Dangerous liaisons between press and power

Wednesday 27 February 2008

French daily "Le Parisien" has caused a stir by admitting its interview with President Sarkozy was modified by the president's office, raising questions about the link between French media and their sources.

Wednesday 27 February 2008

By Marie Valla / FRANCE 24

Even before the dust has had a chance to settle from French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ‘get lost you cretin’ mishap at the Agricultural Fair, a new Elysée faux pas has become the talk of the French media. French Daily Le Parisien admitted on Wednesday that the President’s interview published in the paper the day before had not only been reread but also modified by the Elysée press service.

This infringement by the Sarkozy administration blurs the lines between politics and journalism. “In Moscow, they used to hide the official portraits of personalities who had fallen into disfavor. At the Elysée, they rewrite interviews given by the President,” wrote newspaper L’Humanité in its Wednesday edition.

In the interview, Sarkozy stands by Saturday’s outburst adding that “Just because you become President doesn’t mean that you suddenly become something people can wipe their feet on.” L’Elysee thought best to add the sentence “At the Fair, I should not have answered,” thereby significantly changing the tone of his initial answer. “This sounds like a press aide desperately trying to do damage control after the fact,” says Christopher Dickey, Newsweek bureau chief in Paris.

But the bigger problem is the fact that the Le Parisien editorial team - arguing that they were providing useful information to the reader - failed to mention which portions of the interview were an addition. “This is inappropriate,” says Stefan Simons, Paris correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel. It isn’t so much the fact that the interview was reread that’s problematic but “the way in which it was done. At Der Spiegel, heads of state are always given the possibility to read and fix their interviews before publication,” he adds.

“Here’s what a US newspaper would do: they would have said ‘here is what Sarkozy said’ and ‘his office called and added this clarification,’’ says Dickey. Unlike the French press, American news outlets rarely give transcripts for interviewees to reread and even more rarely let them fix or rewrite quotes.

In France, where political action and journalism are historically linked, there is a need to explicitly define the relationship between sources and journalists, says Jean-Marie Charon, the author of Journalists and Their Audience, The Great Misunderstanding. “We went from a stage when journalists could say ‘no we won’t let you reread the interview’ to a stage where, to avoid misunderstandings, it became acceptable to reread interviews, to a situation today where rewriting is even tolerated,” he says.

Yet, the differences between an Anglo-Saxon tradition of journalists’ independence from sources and the sometimes incestuous French ways are diminishing. In Europe and the US communication, political in particular, is increasingly more efficient and professional.

“Over the last 20 years, powerful politicians have come to understand that they can control the media by controlling access,” says Newsweek’s Dickey. “The journalists who cover the White House or the Elysée know that if they cross the line, they won’t get access anymore.” Given the multiplication of news outlets and the their relative loss of influence, the names Le Monde or New York Times aren’t a big enough guarantee anymore that access will be given even in the face of negative coverage.

Journalists in France are quick to stress the gap between the public image of a President who likes to say that ‘he speaks his mind’ and the control his staff keeps on anything that touches the Elysee. “Everybody is very careful of what they say and for journalists, the threshold to the Elysée is as high as the Great China Wall!” says Simons. A climb that Le Parisien was willing to make, and pay a high price for.