In the columns of SocietyÉlise Lucet discussed the success of Cash Investigation, on the air for more than ten years already. But the show also had consequences, sometimes negative, on employees who hadn’t seen it coming.
On April 27, 2012, Cash Investigation entered the program schedules. An investigative magazine which celebrated its tenth anniversary on March 16, a few months late. Since the start of the show on France 2, it’s Elise Lucet who takes control. Each issue, namely 60 to date, requires hours of work. And the presenter is far from not taking the matter seriously, and for good reason, she has done more than 234 interviews since the creation of the magazine, four per survey. As for the interviews carried out while running in the street – called “catch me if you can” internally – they are not so numerous, since they represent only 30% of his work. Today, Élise Lucet can be proud of Cash Investigation which brings together, on average, 2.50 million viewers.
Élise Lucet seen as “the nice presenter of 1 p.m.” in Cash Investigation
Before being at the helm of Cash InvestigationÉlise Lucet made a name for herself in this field as an investigative journalist between 2000 and 2011 thanks to Exhibits before finally creating the show which will have been a turning point in his career. During the first issue, devoted to “disease sellers”, the speaker Dr Hansel thought he was arriving on conquered ground, while Élise Lucet had devoted a report to him in the JT of the 13 hours of France 2 which it presented in parallel. But she didn’t let herself go, on the contrary, she had elements of language that surprised her interlocutors. “A lot of bosses and decision-makers saw me as the nice presenter of 1 p.m., and that’s it”she confides in the magazine Society. Indeed, as she explains, “nobody expected pugnacious interviews“given that she had to remain very factual during the news.
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Stakeholders criticize the show’s ways of doing things
Cash Investigation sometimes had bad consequences for some employees, especially at the beginning of the program. One interviewee in the first season felt “trapped” : “She asked me the same questions 30 times, I was completely destabilized. I ended up crying. This interview is a task in my career, a failure. I stayed ten years in my box before leaving. She penalized me for ten years“, she remembers. A way of doing things that Valérie Bignon also denounces, the former director general of communication for the Nestlé group. “The day after the broadcast, my boss called me into his office, and I got kicked out“, she reveals. And to add: “Humanly, these are very questionable methods. Because it’s never those upstairs who get fired, it’s those who work. Those exposed are the bravest. Or the most naive.“
