RFI broadcasts 24 hours per day around the world in French and in 16 other languages in FM, shortwave, medium wave, satellite and on its website. It is a channel of the state company France Médias Monde. The majority of shortwave transmissions are in French and Hausa but also includes some hours of Swahili, Portuguese, Mandinka, and Russian. RFI broadcasts to over 150 countries on 5 continents.[2][non-primary source needed] Africa is the largest part of radio listeners, representing 60% of the total audience in 2010.[3][non-primary source needed] In the Paris region, RFI comprises between 150,000 and 200,000 listeners. Its digital platforms attract an average of 24.6 million visits a month (2022 average) while 31.1 million followers stay connected via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and Youtube.[1][non-primary source needed]
In 2020, the audience was of 58.1 million listeners (up to 11.6 million compared to 2019, +25%), breaking down into 29.8 million in French-speaking Africa, 11 million in non-French speaking Africa, 2 million in the Maghreb region, 1.3 million in Europe, 13 million in the Americas and 1 million in Asia.[4][non-primary source needed]
It also owns Monte Carlo Doualiya (formerly Radio Monte Carlo Middle East), which produces Arabic programmes in Paris, and airs them from a transmitter in Cyprus to audiences across the Middle East and North Africa.
Incidents
On 17 September 2002, Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadéma tried to stop the broadcasting of an interview with one of his opponents, Agbéyomé Kodjo, by phoning directly to the Elysée Palace. The interview was not censored by Jean-Paul Cluzel, RFI's CEO at the time, due to the coordinated intervention of the journalists' trade unions. However, a report raising questions regarding the French secret services responsibilities in the 1995 death of judge Bernard Borrel in Djibouti, which was broadcast on 17 May 2005, was later removed from RFI's website for undisclosed reasons, possibly due to the intervention of Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh.[5]
In November 2020, RFI mistakenly published numerous obituaries of famous people on its own web site, as well as sending them to related web sites, after moving draft stories to a new system.[7]
