Groupe Le Monde (Xavier Niel, founder of Free and 42 schools, wed to Bernard Arnault's daughter (French Bourgeoisie is a small world)).
But Le Monde Diplomatique's redaction has been able to remain independent thanks to it's 49% shares and veto right.
It's also fairly small (~10 permanent journalists + independent contributors, ~150k monthly readers).
It's not really the kind of journal able to sustain a long investigation, it's more "social commentaries with a left-leaning/alter-mundialist point of view".
In April 2024, Le Monde Group’s majority stakeholder became a financial endowment, or fonds de dotation (FDD), named Fonds pour l'indépendance de la presse.
This structure is also used by Mediapart, owned by Fonds pour une presse libre, and Libération, owned by Fonds de dotation pour une presse indépendante, with Mediapart being inspired to emulate The Manchester Guardian (which has been operated by a trust since 1936): https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/medias/le-monde-appartie...
Yet, it might be reasonably true: as stated in the Wikipedia page, Le Monde Diplomatique is read mostly by educated people, who probably are 1/ less susceptible to/more aware of coarse manipulation 2/ much less numerous.
That's to say, influencing (too much) the redaction might have too low of a costs/benefits ratio.
Personal anecdote: I've read it a few times about a decade ago. At that time, I perceived some of the articles to be more emotionally grounded than rationally, and the prose to be at time needlessly heavy, "sophisticated".
Those are the main reasons why I didn't kept reading it more often.
I had the same experience as you with Le Monde diplomatique. The language used in some of the articles felt a lot like propaganda ( hyperbolic language, us vs them, anger/emotional language, basic facts being ignored etc ). I was very surprised since the paper had a good reputation , and gave up. Maybe ( hopefully) this has changed.
