The French can actually still *fire* people?!
Posted on 12/28/2003 7:05:21 PM PST by quidnunc
Paris – Alain Hertoghe believes that in covering the Iraq conflict, French newspapers recreated "the war they would have liked to have seen." That meant concentration on the Vietnams and Stalingrads that didn't take place, he said, and so many more accounts of U.S. difficulties rather than advances that it was "impossible to understand how the Americans won."
For making assertions like these in a book called "La Guerre à Outrances," subtitled "How the press disinformed us on Iraq" and published by Calmann Lévy, Hertoghe was fired this month from his post as deputy editor at the Web site of La Croix, a respected Roman Catholic daily newspaper.
The newspaper's management justified the dismissal, Hertoghe said in an interview, by contending that the book demonstrated his opposition to La Croix's editorial line, damaged the reputation of the newspaper and the authority of its chief editors and questioned the professional ethics of some of the paper's staff members.
Hertoghe's book covers the performance of four national newspapers and France's largest regional daily over a three-week period in March and April. It contends that the coverage was ideological, in line with the French government's position opposing the United States, and that it was desirous of portraying a great catastrophe for the Americans.
Largely ignored in the newspapers that it finds at fault, the book fits into an emerging series of critical analyses in Europe of the European news media's treatment of the war. In Britain, attention has focused on what has been described as the British Broadcasting Company's biased position against British participation.
In Germany, an independent media watchdog group, Medien Tenor, has produced a report, to be released next month, on the performance of television reporting of the conflict in Germany, Britain, the United States and other countries. It focuses notably on Germany's two main state-financed channels, finding that the United States was treated negatively.
A draft of the report, underwritten in part by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says of the state networks: "After assuming a position of sharp criticism of American military actions, abandoned only after their increasing success, and after fixating on the Iraqis as suffering victims, they created a representation of the war in line with the position" of the German government. It continues, "Critical questions concerning the extent to which the unrelenting German position contributed to the escalation of the conflict were thus kept from public scrutiny."
Criticism by Iraqis and Americans of the war "dominated the coverage" of the ZDF state channel's main newscasts, the group said. America's decision to go to war, it said, was juxtaposed by German television, "with the supposedly unanimous opposition of the rest of the world."
But the dismissal of Hertoghe, 44, for making essentially the same characterization of the leading French newspapers, was unique.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
Hertoghe said newspapers ignored reports from journalists traveling with U.S. forces, including those from Agence France-Presse, when they did not indicate insurmountable difficulties.
"The papers wanted disaster, and when the reporting didn't reflect it, they predicted it," he said.
"Le Monde went the furthest," he added. "I wrote that Le Monde became 'Saddam's Gazette.' It gave a picture from Baghdad of Saddam's units perfectly controlling the situation. The difference between Le Monde and Le Figaro was that Le Figaro insisted that American tanks would operate easily on Baghdad's wide streets."
"Then when the Americans made their move, we read how they were massacring the Iraqis. The explanation for the collapse was that Saddam's fedayeen had so much compassion for the population that they stopped fighting."
Gee, and when can we expect the Left to have massive rallies in support of Hertoghe since his freedom of speech has obviously been assailed?
Oh...right. Never.
Just another sterling example of the hypocrisy of the Left.
The average person sucks it all in as the basic reality in their lives, whether it's total bunk or not. This is precisely why corporations pour billions and billions of dollars each year into advertising and marketing in the media. They know full well that most folks are deeply influenced by the media. Since they have truth-in-advertising laws, they should make truth-in-news reporting laws; it's the only way to get the liberal media to just report on the facts and let the people decide what it all means. I'm sick and tired of the liberal media slant.
That's the truth. My French is too rusty to read it but I'd buy the English version.
Oh geee, now that I see Agence France-Press was being coerced by the...uh...the media, I will now feel all guilty for believing they were a bunch of just biased creeps on a mission to bash Bush, incite terrorism and turn Chirac into another Charlemagne. I feel their pain.
NOT
The French can actually still *fire* people?!
They say that like it's a bad thing.
Shame I missed that one.
Hmm...what was that Biblical passage that says something along the lines of "One cannot serve two masters, G_d and Mammon"?
I see that this RC paper seems to be backing one side...the WRONG one!
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