France's excesses in opposition to war
Daniel Schneidermann
Translation by Douglas
French original: "Les outrances françaises de l'antiguerre"
(Daniel Schneidermann, Liberation, 2003/12/26)Meeting with general indifference, the daily newspaper La Croix has just fired one of its reporters, Alain Hertoghe, formerly deputy editor in chief of the Web site lacroix.fr. Why? Hertoghe published a book (1) criticizing last spring’s coverage of the Iraq war by five French dailies: Le Figaro, Libération, Le Monde, Ouest-France, all of which wouldn’t have caused any problems. But he also criticized his own newspaper, La Croix, particularly the editorials of his own editor, Bruno Frappat, who did not turn the other cheek. Several days before Christmas, the rebel was thrown out into the street.
The matter made little noise: a few bulletins in the aforementioned dailies. On reading the book, one understands better this indifference. It is surely due to the fact that Alain Hertoghe commits not only the crime of criticizing his own newspaper but also of running counter to the majority of French opinion. Had he criticized the media for their support of the American war, his having been fired would surely have aroused greater emotion. But the facts are to the contrary. For him, the five dailies, over which he poured day after day, saw through a “a triple partisan prism: demonize the Bush administration, adhere to the Chirac-Villepin line and make common cause with anti-war public opinion.”
The book is a damning compilation of excerpts of editorials and reports, presented in chronological order. George Bush? Before the start of the war, he is caricatured by the French press as a “religious madman.” “To believe the French dialies,” writes Hertoghe, “with the exception of a handful of admirable pacifists, America seems to be peopled only by unpleasant “patriots,” who are brainless, egotistical and violent.” He is outraged that some editorials equated Bush with Saddam. He points out how the press magnified and over-covered the peace marches in European capitals. Such political and ideological hostility, according to Hertoghe, leads these newspapers, which “dream of an American defeat,” to see the military expedition through a deforming rear-view mirror. With a “sinister joy,” the French press would exaggerate the difficulties with which the allied forces met and over-interpret the least sigh on the part of every American spokesman the better to invent imaginary “changes in American strategy.” Are the advancing American columns pausing for a sandstorm? The war is declared lost. In addition to such blindness, some editorialists and experts demonstrate incoherence: while they damn the war, they also criticize the Pentagon for not conducting it more forcefully. Believing in a “new Vietnam,” they foresee, in apocalyptic tones, an American quagmire in a battle of “Saddamgrad.” Nothing surprising in all this: the special Baghdad envoys of the French press are closely “hemmed in” by Iraqi censors, which they reveal only hesitatingly to their readers. No luck for them: despite all their expectations, Baghdad falls in several days.
Convincing and well sourced, Alain Hertoghe’s book is also debatable. Whoever makes the effort to recall the media coverage of the Iraq war will have difficulty recognizing it in Hertoghe’s simplified portrait. Moreover, there was more pluralism in the written press than he admits. The author (and this is the rule of the game) favored those citations that support his thesis at the expense of other texts. From Pascal Bruckner to Romain Goupil, most newspapers reported the arguments of the “pro-war” intellectuals. Hertoghe also excludes the audiovisual media from his field of observation — they, who are by nature preoccupied with the event as it happens, helped balance out the the ambient “media noise.” Finally, even at this late date, History is far from written and has not yet disproved those editorialists who predicted the blackest consequences for this campaign, and the quagmire of a “new Vietnam” for the Americans.
Still. This pamphlet will cruelly remind journalists how the moment can blind them. On the weakness of the Iraqi dictatorship or the psychology of the American neoconservatives, to mention only two examples, did the press sufficiently inform their readers? Is it still doing so today? Of course, the ideological presuppositions of reporters, their desire to keep in line with public opinion, bias the way they report the facts. Reminding them of this is a good thing. And it is precisely because Hertoghe’s book is debatable that it should be contested, refuted if need be, formally debated, including (and above all) in the pages of his own newspaper. La Croix, which is rightly proud of its merits, has missed the chance to prove them. The national French press is in crisis for several reasons, particularly because its readers accuse it of not fully and honestly informing them. It isn’t by quietly firing those of its journalists who share this view that it will regain its lost credibility.
(1) Alain Hertoghe, "La Guerre à outrances", éd. Calmann-Lévy, 15 €.
[Posted 2003/12/29]
Copyright © Watch 2001-2006.
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