  This study provides a large-scale mapping of the French media space using
digital methods to estimate political polarization and to study information
circuits. We collect data about the production and circulation of online news
stories in France over the course of one year, adopting a multi-layer
perspective on the media ecosystem. We source our data from websites, Twitter
and Facebook. We also identify a certain number of important structural
features. A stochastic block model of the hyperlinks structure shows the
systematic rejection of counter-informational press in a separate cluster which
hardly receives any attention from the mainstream media. Counter-informational
sub-spaces are also peripheral on the consumption side. We measure their
respective audiences on Twitter and Facebook and do not observe a large
discrepancy between both social networks, with counter-information space, far
right and far left media gathering limited audiences. Finally, we also measure
the ideological distribution of news stories using Twitter data, which also
suggests that the French media landscape is quite balanced. We therefore
conclude that the French media ecosystem does not suffer from the same level of
polarization as the US media ecosystem. The comparison with the American
situation also allows us to consolidate a result from studies on
disinformation: the polarization of the journalistic space and the circulation
of fake news are phenomena that only become more widespread when dominant and
influential actors in the political or journalistic space spread topics and
dubious content originally circulating in the fringe of the information space.
