It took an investigation into the use of European funds for the general public to discover a reality that communication professionals have known for a long time: at the highest levels, speaking up is rarely left to chance.
At the end of 2025, Le Canard enchaîné reveals that a media training contract funded by funds from the European Parliament amounted to 133,300 euros between 2019 and 2021. The arrangement involved several French MEPs from the Identity and Democracy group, but Jordan Bardella would have been one of the main beneficiaries, especially from 2021. The contract was intended to improve the communication of the elected officials on European news. But part of the services provided to Bardella is suspected to have served to prepare his French political communication ahead of the 2022 presidential election. The contrast fuels the suspicions: between September and November 2021, Bardella gave more than twenty interviews — about 8 hours and 30 minutes of airtime — of which only about fifteen minutes concerned European current affairs, according to the tally reported by Le Canard enchaîné. These expenditures are now the subject of investigations; the Rassemblement national disputes the accusations and defends the regularity of the services.
Beyond the judicial aspect, this case exposed a mechanism that is rarely shown. Pascal Humeau, his former communications coach, delivered in “Complément d’enquête” a stark testimony about their beginnings, describing the young Bardella as a “hollow shell.” Several years later, he has become one of the French political leaders most seasoned in the television studio.
And Bardella is far from being an exception. In France, the Government Information Service, attached to Matignon, signed in October 2022 a contract renewable until 2026, potentially reaching 1.6 million euros excluding taxes, for “preparation for media and event speaking” — on which several government members benefited, trained by a firm employing former television and radio journalists. Preparing to speak is not a politician’s whim: it has become an infrastructure of power.
Image is not superficial
Let’s clear up a misunderstanding right away. Saying that a leader “works on his image” sounds, in Tunisia as elsewhere, like a reproach: one imagines him hollow, preoccupied with appearances rather than being. That is a misperception.
Being able to explain a difficult decision, reassure teams in uncertainty, answer without getting trapped by a hostile question, represent one’s organization without weakening it — all of this is part of leadership work, not of its decor. A competent leader but unable to make himself understood leaves others to tell his story for him. Media training does not create a skill that does not exist; it prevents a real skill from remaining invisible.
That is why exposed professionals adhere to it. Raphaël Haddad — founder of the agency Mots Clefs, PhD in linguistics on electoral discourse, teaching at Paris I and at the École de guerre — sums it up in one formula: speaking up is a skill that can be worked on, exactly like learning a foreign language or reading a financial statement.
What media training actually teaches
Behind the word, there is a precise toolbox—and not only sold by private firms. The field epidemiology manual of the American CDC itself documents the two most useful techniques when faced with a difficult question: bridging and flagging.
The first, in advance, is the discipline of the message: before the intervention, the spokesperson identifies a few essential ideas that he absolutely wants to convey. The aim is not to recite a text, but to ensure that a ten-minute response does not drown the information the listener needed to retain.
The second is the “bridge,” or bridging. It involves recognizing the question asked, then using a transition formula to steer the conversation back toward the information one deems crucial. But beware of the nuance, decisive for a leader: bridging is not necessarily a load of wooden phrases. Used well, it allows you to respond and then return to the essence. Used to systematically dodge, it produces the opposite effect — the interlocutor understands that you are avoiding, and that is what they remember.
The third is the “flag,” or flagging. It consists of verbally signaling the key point to remember — “what you need to understand is…” — to steer what the audience will keep in memory.
In addition to these techniques are reflexes that are practiced in workshops: listen to the question until the end, reformulate to gain a few seconds of reflection, never adopt the negative formulations contained in a question. All of it is practiced away from cameras, in sessions filmed for teaching purposes and debriefed in detail: the set is not the place of training, but its culmination.
What this series will seek to uncover
Where honesty is needed, one must admit that this world also carries many false certainties sold as scientific laws. You will be told that “93% of communication is nonverbal,” or that a “power stance” held two minutes before a meeting will make you more convincing. These two claims, omnipresent in trainings, do not withstand examination of the research they cite.
That is the very point of this series: to distinguish, each time, what is proven, what is useful, and what comes from myth. We will return to it, with numbers to back it up, in the next episode.
Monday Morning: What a Leader Can Take For His Own Use
You don’t have a camera or a journalist in front of you. You have a management committee, a general meeting, a worried team, a unhappy client. Some of the same tools can apply — provided you do not plaster them on as-is. A journalist interview and a management meeting are not the same interaction, and a bridge executed too bluntly with your own colleagues quickly becomes an awkward evasion.
Before your next high-stakes appearance, set three key messages — not ten — and write them in one sentence each: these are your anchor points. Then identify the two or three questions you fear the most and prepare, for each, a short answer followed by a transition to one of your messages. Practice aloud, ideally filmed on your phone: the gap between what you think you are saying and what you actually say is always instructive. And if you are speaking to a journalist, never assume that an exchange is “off the record” until it has been explicitly agreed beforehand.
None of these gestures amount to manipulation. A leader can learn from media training without turning every meeting into a political interview. These are the foundations of controlled speech — the ones that the most exposed pay dearly to acquire, and you can start working on them this Monday.
The real question remains, the one that runs through this entire series. Why do some leaders inspire almost immediate trust and authority, while others, sometimes just as capable, struggle to convince?
Natural talent probably matters. But much less than people imagine. Part of what we casually call “charisma” can be learned, repeated, and prepared. This is what this series will seek to untangle.
