Reporter for France TV, Ben Barnier had a funny mishap with Michel Barnier and… Google

A journalist for France Info and France 2, Ben Barnier has already had a strange mishap because of his surname…

His face may not be completely unknown to you. Journalist and Senior Reporter for the France Info channel and for France 2, for which he is currently following the American election campaign, Ben Barnier had a strange mishap a few years ago. Obviously, it’s his surname that is to blame, which also saw a spike in searches this Thursday, September 5, with the appointment of Michel Barnier to Matignon.

Just three years ago, in September 2021, when Michel Barnier was a candidate at the Republicans’ congress for the 2022 presidential election, the biography of the former minister and MEP, EU negotiator at the time of Brexit, resurfaced. We are looking at this old bigwig of French politics and his family, as we are doing again today, not without a certain frenzy. Ben Barnier was already at the time a more or less familiar face to regulars of public audiovisual media. Except that by searching for “Ben Barnier” in Google, we then quickly and directly find in the suggestions of the famous search engine, the mention of “Michel Barnier’s son”, as the journalist was moved by on Twitter.

“That’s not my father”

On September 17, 2021, the reporter directly pinned the search engine on the blue bird network: “Dear @GoogleFR can we stop the joke about Michel Barnier’s fake son? I am not the politician’s son. I have nothing against him. He is intelligent, nice, well-mannered. No problem. But he is not my father.” In his thread, Ben Barnier even felt obliged to refer to his own deceased parents. “My parents are called Bernard and Sylvie (✝️). It is to them, their love, their intelligence, their international openness, that I owe my career as a senior reporter on American TV and then on France TV, and not to the architect (of the Brexit agreement),” he wrote.

A few days later, Ben Barnier would mention “tedious steps to correct the information”, without success. “@GoogleFR has just kindly informed me that I am wrong and that I am indeed Michel Barnier’s son???”, the journalist quipped, adding, in a more serious tone: “it freaks me out a bit when I think that we start 95% of our online procedures with a Google search”. In support, a screenshot of the response from the Mountain View firm, assuring that it had “examined [ses] comments”. “Unfortunately, the edit you want to make regarding ‘Ben Barnier’ is not possible at this time. Some elements of Google search, such as publicly accessible website content, can only be edited or removed if they contain inaccurate information,” he will be told.

It seems that since then, Google has double-checked the accuracy of the information, since in 2024, the same Google suggestion for “Ben Barnier” displays “Ben Barnier journalist”. Even if the “related searches”, which Google still highlights (see the screenshot above), always seem to turn towards a certain “son of Michel Barnier”… Let’s bet that Ben Barnier’s ears whistled slightly on this day of white smoke for Matignon.