Two French television stations have apologised after mistakenly showing footage of protests in Albania as scenes from demonstrations in France during the weekend. The first error was made by CNEWS on Saturday, at the very moment a peaceful mass protest was beginning in southern Paris — the largest of nearly 300 protests held across the country, which collectively gathered several hundred thousand people.
The footage shown by CNEWS depicted a group of protesters in the street clapping while one of them waved a red flag. These clips were not filmed at the Porte d'Italie in Paris, as the channel claimed, but in Tirana, the capital of Albania, where protests were also held on Saturday, as in several other locations across Europe. Some of the people in the footage were wearing ski goggles and masks covering their faces, and the commentator following the report on CNEWS said they were behaving "like future vandals, like future hooligans".
Clashes broke out at the end of the Paris protest: masked protesters threw objects and pyrotechnics at police, who responded with tear gas, loud stun grenades and water cannons. Violence occurred to a lesser extent in other towns and cities. The French Ministry of the Interior announced on Sunday that police had arrested 1,314 people.
The Associated Press (AP) also reported on the protests in Tirana and other locations on Saturday and confirmed that the footage shown on CNEWS, labelled as scenes from Porte d'Italie in Paris, was actually filmed on Rruga e Durrësit street in central Tirana. The head of CNEWS later apologised on air for what the television station called on its website a "footage swap". Editor Olivier Benkemoun explained that the channel had been receiving video footage from multiple locations and had mistakenly labelled some of them.
"Earlier you saw those guys covering their faces. Well, that was not in Paris. We made a mistake in the edit. So I really want to apologise, on behalf of the entire editorial team, because the footage of people covering their faces was from Albania," Benkemoun said. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left presidential candidate, wrote on social media platform X: "They showed footage from Albania as if reporting live from Porte d'Italie! Shameful".
Public broadcaster Franceinfo made a similar error on Saturday, also swapping Albania for France. It showed footage of police in riot gear advancing down a street and taking cover behind two trucks equipped with water cannons, and the AP confirmed that this was the Dëshmorët e Kombit boulevard in central Tirana. The Franceinfo programme claimed the footage was live from Lyon, and the presenter said the situation in Lyon, in south-eastern France, looked "a bit tense". Three minutes later, the presenter corrected the error: "We made a mistake. These were not live shots from Lyon, but from Tirana. I apologise".
