Le Pen's FN turns away news outlets from post-vote event
Paris (AFP) - Around 15 news outlets said Sunday they had been barred from the election night gathering for French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and her supporters.
Le Pen's National Front (FN) said they were turned away because of a lack of space at the venue, a dance hall in Vincennes, just east of Paris.
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Bloomberg News, Le Monde, Liberation and L'Humanite newspapers, and the newsweekly L'Obs said they would boycott the event out of "solidarity" with the other outlets.
Buzzfeed and Mediapart were among the online news sites that said on Twitter they were refused accreditation for the event, as well as reporters from Britain's Sky News, the US monthly The Atlantic and the Italian public TV channel Rai.
"In solidarity with our counterparts, the editors of Liberation... have decided not to attend," the paper's deputy editor Johan Hufnagel said, calling the snub "anti-democratic"
Le Monde's editor in chief Luc Bronner said the move, coming "after several other incidents, shows a poor concept of freedom of the press."
Le Pen's rival, centrist Emmanuel Macron, is favourite to clinch the presidency on Sunday with the last opinion polls before the vote giving him a lead of more than 20 points.
After the April 23 first round of the election, a journalist who had recently published a book about Le Pen was among media representatives barred from the party celebrating her second-place showing.
Around 40 media outlets signed a petition after the first round protesting the FN's selective accreditation of journalists to follow Le Pen's campaign, saying it "undermined freedom to inform".
Le Pen's campaign director David Rachline told AFP that because of space limitations "it is obvious that those with the largest audience should have preference."
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