Jean-Pierre Elkabas, her great figure French journalism and famous for his innumerable interviews during a particularly long career, has died at the age of 86.
Tireless professional, who analyzed and commented on political life for more than 60 years, Jean-Pierre Elcampas ehe has also been the head of radio and television stations.
This pillar of the French national media scene had also interviewed the greats of this world: Arafat, Gorbachev, Mandela, Castro, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin…
Canal+ channel and Europe 1 radio station announced the death of their former star yesterday, Tuesday evening, shortly after it was announced by Paris Match magazine.
President Emmanuel Macron today hailed “a sacred monster of French journalism”.
Born in 1937, Jean-Pierre Elkabas began his career as a RTF (Radio-télévision française) correspondent in Oran, the Algerian city where he was born, before being posted in 1961 to Paris.
After years on the small screen, he started working on Europe 1 in the early 1980s and was to do a lot on it.
After Socialist François Mitterrand won the 1981 presidential election, he was fired from public broadcaster Antenne 2, accused of right-wing sympathies of former head of state Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
He then served as president and CEO of public broadcasters France 2 and France 3 and fostered the rise of new presenters. But when contracts worth hundreds of millions of francs with the star presenters-producers of France 2 were revealed, he was forced to resign in 1996.
The reactions to the news of his death were many from all those he had interviewed at some point.
“Jean-Pierre Elkabas left his mark on an entire generation. I belong to it,” reacted the right-wing ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy’s Socialist successor, Francois Hollande, praised a “militancy that no interlocutor could exhaust”.
He is also famous for a response – “Bullshit Elkabas!” – attributed to the former head of the French Communist Party, Georges Marchet, which he never actually gave.
This phrase, which subsequently became “cult”, was actually invented by the humorist Thierry Leliron, joking with a stormy interview in 1980 between the head of the GKK and the journalist.
Jean-Pierre Elkabas was married to writer Nicole Avril and father of a daughter, actress Emmanuelle Bass.
Source: News Beast
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