Slate

The French version of the famous American online outlet is largely owned by its founders.

Economist and state advisor Jacques Attali (see below) and journalists Jean-Marie Colombani (see below), Johan Hufnagel, Eric Le Boucher and Eric Leser own 57 percent of the capital.

Twenty percent of the site belongs to Viveris, 17 percent to the Washington Post and 6 percent to the bank BNP Paribas.

Like the Parisian subsidiary of the Huffington Post, Slate is a French version of the famous American site. Introduced in 2009, it had some 1.5 million unique viewers per month at the beginning of 2014. Supposed to be an online magazine, it claims to stand back and take an objective look on the information, sometimes not without provocation.

Launched, among others, by Jean-Marie Colombani, a former Le Monde manager with very Atlanticist ideas, and the scandal-prone Jacques Attali, the media outlet is not excluded from criticism. Its pro-American approach made it publish some anti-Russian articles, in particular at the time of conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. The outlet was then accused by several observers of being not perfectly objective (see ‘Controversies’).

Co-founder and the chairman of the supervisory board of Slate, Jacques Attali is a man of many talents. He is an economist, a writer, a senior civil servant and even an adviser of French presidents. This close friend of François Mitterrand is a Europeanist and a convinced globalist. Defender of an open, connected and multicultural world, Jacques Attali has a sharp personality.

In 1981, he wrote in his book titled "The future is life" a shocking sentence concerning euthanasia that he has later been repeatedly reproached with: "The lengthening of life expectancy is no longer an objective desired by the logic of power. As soon as a man reaches 60-65 years old, he lives longer than he produces and becomes expensive to society. In fact, from a societal point of view, it is preferable that the human machine stops brutally rather than gradually become worn out... In any case, euthanasia will become one of the major instruments of our future societies".

He has never hidden his desire to see nations gradually fade, giving way to a world government. Speaking to a journalist, he also once mentioned his desire to see Jerusalem become the "capital of a new world order."

Jacques Attali is a co-founder of the Socialism and Judaism association and a member of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF). In 2012, he created controversy by telling a joke that was supposed to represent the financial crisis "better than any economic theory." The story revolves around several characters with Jewish-sounding names who cheat a person named "Christian" using one-legged trousers.

Recently, he announced he’s working on the development of a presidential program, expected to be released in 2016 "in order that in 2017, candidates would compete against each other not on the color of their tie, but on the projects they would like to propose for the country."

Former Le Monde director (see the "controversies" section of Le Monde newspaper) Jean-Marie Colombani is a well-known figure in the French media sphere. In 2009, he participated in a launch of the French version of the web-magazine Slate. During the last two years, every Monday, he has also been writing a column in the daily, free-of-charge Direct Matin.

Known for his Atlanticist point of view, he is a member of the Siècle and has gone through the French American Foundation, which claims to aim for "strengthening the ties between France and the United States." In particular, it proposes seminars for "young leaders," or more precisely, for young French and Americans having "a strong leadership potential and who will play an important role in their country and in the French-American relationships."

The day after September 11, 2001, Jean-Marie Colombani took a pen and wrote one of his most famous articles titled "We are all Americans". Some observers then criticized him for being an Americanophile.

In an article published March 12, 2015, in Direct Matin and reposted by Slate, Jean-Marie Colombani attacked Russia once again. After the publication of a survey showing an increase in the proportion of happy people in the country, the journalist tried hard to demonstrate that this result is not logical. To complete his demonstration, he relied on the works of Simeon Djankov, a Bulgarian pro-European economist and politician. He advanced an avalanche of pessimistic figures and concluded by explaining that Russians "like to suffer" and that the "paranoia" regarding the government is at a maximum level. Several observers such as Jacques Sapir, an economist, and Olivier Berruyer, an economics blogger, dismantled the article to pieces, qualifying it an anti-Russian propaganda.

Last May, Slate announced in one of its articles that "A war will start this summer according to a NATO official, and if we are lucky enough, this war would not be a nuclear war." Just for information, this war would be, of course, provoked by the Russian politics regarding Ukraine. What source did Slate use? A NATO official named John Schindler, former NSA analyst and professor at the US Naval Academy. In one word, a source whose objectivity can legitimately be questioned.