The man she replaced took a job working for the new president. The springtime election of François Hollande,
the first French president from the left in 17 years, has brought about
a shuffling of the news media ranks, along with a host of potential
conflicts of interest.
Coverage has shifted too. Much of the news media, which largely lean
left, used to revel in denouncing Mr. Hollande’s predecessor,
Nicolas Sarkozy, but now many journalists are feeling bereft of material because of the new president’s less dramatic governing style.
Mr. Hollande
has proved confoundedly boring, they say, especially for news outlets
that sometimes cover the government as if nothing else matters, relying
on Paris politics to drive the news.
The line between politicians and the news media can be blurry in
France,
where the fates of some journalists have long been hitched to those in
the government they pester or please. Mr. Sarkozy’s close ties to media
executives were considered something of a scandal, and his presidency
drew greater scrutiny to the incestuous relationships.
Mr. Hollande campaigned on a pledge to be “exemplary.” But in a country
where much of the Paris elite share a common background, attended the
same schools and go to the same parties, the traditional commingling of
journalists and politicians has endured. Daniel Carton, a former
reporter in France, blames the news media for not doing more to resist
such close ties.
“They know exactly what they need to do to avoid things getting out of
hand, but they won’t do it,” said Mr. Carton, an outspoken critic of
conflicts of interest in French journalism.
For decades, newspapers have relied heavily on state subsidies. The
public media, which account for perhaps half of mainstream television
and radio news, are still run by political appointees. Private media
outlets belong to companies or investors with demonstrated political
leanings or business connections to the state, undermining journalistic
impartiality.
Perhaps most striking this election cycle was the situation of Étienne Mougeotte, whose run as top editor at the rightist daily
Le Figaro began and ended with the presidency of Mr. Sarkozy, the politician he championed and whom he was said to advise.
“We’re a newspaper of the center and the right, and we support Nicolas Sarkozy,” Mr. Mougeotte told the center-left
Le Monde
last year. Under Mr. Mougeotte, Le Figaro was routinely criticized,
sometimes by its own reporters, as being a mouthpiece for the
government.
Mr. Hollande was said to have requested Mr. Mougeotte’s dismissal,
according to French media reports, and it came in July.
The publisher, Serge Dassault, is a senator from Mr. Sarkozy’s political party. But Mr. Dassault also heads a
major military contractor, and there was
widespread speculation that Mr. Mougeotte’s ouster was meant to put the Daussault group in good stead with the new president.
The news and culture magazine
Les inRockuptibles
hired as its new top editor Audrey Pulvar, a radio and television
personality who was also the partner of Arnaud Montebourg, a government
minister and a prominent member of the Socialist Party.
Mr. Pulvar recently announced the end of her relationship with Mr.
Montebourg, but other such relationships have continued.
Valérie
Trierweiler, Mr. Hollande’s current partner, began an affair with him
while reporting on him in the early 2000s, when he was a member of the
National Assembly. She grudgingly passed on a television news job this
fall and stayed at the magazine
Paris Match as a critic.
Ms. Pulvar replaced David Kessler, who left to join Mr. Hollande as an adviser. Also, a legal affairs reporter at
Europe 1 radio became the spokesman for the justice ministry. A political reporter at
Les Échos, a leading French financial newspaper, joined the prime minister’s press office.
The public media have gone through postelection changes too.
In October,
Mr. Hollande named a new director for the country’s international radio
and television news networks,
RFI and
France 24. He has pledged to reform the law that allowed him to make that appointment, but not until next year. The directors of
Radio France and
France Télévisions,
both appointed by Mr. Sarkozy, are expected to be replaced. The current
law, which makes the naming of public media chiefs a presidential
prerogative, was introduced by
Mr. Sarkozy
in 2009. At the time, commentators called the measure a power grab. Mr.
Sarkozy said it was meant to remove a layer of “hypocrisy” from the
appointment process, which was controlled by a handpicked government
council.
The public media no longer serve as state propagandists, as they
effectively were until at least the late 1960s, but remain under
government “oversight,” said Jean-Marie Charon, a sociologist who
studies the news media.
Private publications are also beholden to the state, at least
financially. The government provided $1.5 billion in subsidies to them
last year.
Publications on the left are struggling to “find the right distance”
from the government, Mr. Charon said. The jubilation that dominated
political coverage last summer in Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur and
Le Monde has since given way to acrimony. Whichever way the French news
media lean, the departure of Mr. Sarkozy has left many outlets yearning
for more excitement.
“We had five years that were pretty exceptional; we had a man who was
the center of everything,” said Pierre Haski, co-founder and editor of
Rue89, a news Web site. “All of a sudden, we’ve gone from an overload to
an underload.”
“Sarkozy was good for sales,” Mr. Haski added. “Hollande is not good for sales.”
La Tribune publie un article de Aurélien Véron, Anne Bourdu, Gaspard Koenig et Charles Beigbeder, membres dirigeants du Parti Liberal Démocrate.
