By Matthew Kaminski
PARIS -- On April 3, six days before the fall of Baghdad, La Croix published grainy pictures of Frenchmen fleeing the Nazis next to fresh shots of Iraqis leaving Basra. The caption read: "Images of exodus and penury in France in 1940, and this year in Iraq."
The French Catholic daily left out a few details. The Shiites in the southern Iraqi city weren't refugees on the run, merely residents walking in and out of the city. La Croix failed to mention, as well, that the British put off an attack on Basra expressly to avoid civilian casualties. When the British were welcomed in Basra as liberators a few days later, suffice to say La Croix didn't carry the news alongside photos of Frenchmen greeting the Allies in Paris in 1944.
La Croix was hardly alone in bending the news to fit a political agenda -- or in implying parallels between "les Anglo-Americains" (a phrase memorably used by Vichy about the Allies) and the Nazis. In his new book "La Guerre a Outrances: Comment la presse nous a desinforme sur l'Irak" (All Out War: How the press misinformed us about Iraq), Alain Hertoghe shows how the French media abdicated journalism for politics. An editor at La Croix, Mr. Hertoghe clinically goes through 19 days of reporting in the five leading dailies, including his own, without taking a position on the war. In that respect alone, he is unusual.
Whatever their political hue, he writes, the papers sought to "make the Bush administration look diabolical, adhere to the position of the Chirac-Villepin couple and commune with anti-war public opinion." Forget about just reporting the facts and letting readers decide. Of the 2,746 articles published during the war, only 356 gave a favorable image of the Anglo-American effort to topple Saddam Hussein, according to the book. As if to prove his point, the French press has answered Mr. Hertoghe's criticism with deafening silence.
This one-sided coverage suggests why group think (pensee unique in French) took such a firm grip on France this year, producing a strange, at least for a democracy, uniformity of opinion. Reasonable people may disagree on Iraq. In France, nearly everyone agrees with everyone else, and most of all with their government.
The opinion surveys and street protests here might give the impression that France must be in thrall of passionate anti-Americanism. During a recent trip I made to New York, the question often asked of this American living in Paris was: "Do they hate us over there?"
Well, not exactly. Hate suggests emotion. France's public discourse on America (Iraq is really just a proxy) is most notable for its listless conformity. It's boring. I regret to report no one has yet insulted, much less harassed, me. While the U.S. seems polarized, France goes the other extreme, virtual unanimity. France didn't host anti-U.S. demonstrations -- it put on parades in which the country marched in lock step.
In pushing their staunch opposition to anything Washington might want on Iraq, President Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, can only be pleased to find such willing accomplices in the media. Only this strategy doesn't look so healthy for the papers themselves.
In his recent book "Le Pouvoir de Monde" ("The Power of Le Monde: When a newspaper wants to change France") Bernard Poulet notes that "the 'professionalism' of journalism was never really established" in France, where reporters "hesitate between being a militant or a writer, even more so an intellectual." Unable to deliver independent and reliable news, many French papers will have a hard time surviving, he argues.
The paper of record, Le Monde, has been badly rattled this year. "The Hidden Face of Le Monde" by Philippe Cohen and Pierre Pean was a blockbuster hit, selling more than 200,000 copies. The authors make sweeping allegations about secret financial and political arrangements made by the paper's top editors. The details aren't as relevant as the book's success in calling into question Le Monde's credibility and its motives in shaping public opinion. Mr. Poulet stirs less controversy in his measured follow-up to that best-seller but the book has generated plenty of buzz. As has Daniel Schneidermann's "Media Nightmare," which took his bosses at Le Monde to task for not addressing the issues raised by the Cohen-Pean book. Le Monde subsequently fired Mr. Schneidermann.
In Iraq, the papers' not-so-hidden agenda ended up stifling debate. A friend at Le Monde said the older generation at the afternoon daily thought its uncritical coverage helped lead France's leaders to commit the diplomatic mistakes that wound up alienating not only most of America but a large chunk of Europe, too.
As it happens, a handful of intellectuals consistently spoke out in favor of dumping Saddam and against France's staunch anti-Americanism, among them Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres, and the writers Andre Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Levy. It didn't take long for some people to notice what these men had in common: Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim theologian, just published an attack on these "French Jewish intellectuals." Is anti-Semitism in the defense of group think defensible? We'll see.
The French media will have a hard time redeeming itself after Iraq. During the conflict, Le Monde wrote seven "anti-Saddam" articles to 49 "anti-coalition"; at the left-wing Liberation, this ratio was three to 31, found Mr. Hertoghe. On the political right, Le Figaro lauded Mr. Chirac for leading "la resistance française" -- yes, as in those plucky Frenchmen who shot at the Nazis -- "against American hegemony." Perhaps overeager to keep his Iraqi visa, Remy Ourdan, Le Monde's man in Baghdad, "never hid his optimism for the strategy of the dictator," Mr. Hertoghe writes.
But the problem was usually back in Paris, not in the field. France's foreign correspondents are as gritty and independent-minded as they come. Le Figaro's Adrien Jaulmes won France's top journalism prize after covertly hiking into Taliban-run Afghanistan before Kabul fell in 2001, and in early April filed a dispatch from the Iraqi frontline on Saddam's "dirty war," describing the army's use of civilian shields. The story ran in London's Daily Telegraph, which took Le Figaro copy, but not in Le Figaro itself. Mr. Jaulmes's editors presumably decided the article didn't fit the official line.
Even April 9 was a failure. Le Monde blared: "Americans Face Chaos in Baghdad." No French paper used the word liberation -- unlike in 1975 when Le Monde hailed Pol Pot's ascent to power in Cambodia with "Phnom Penh Libere." If even the most blistering military victory in recent history was a disaster in French eyes, one can imagine the tone of the reporting in the aftermath. Is it any wonder that a third of Frenchmen wanted Saddam Hussein to defeat America, and that now Americans are pouring fine Bordeaux down the drains?
The French are highly literate and disputatious. Yet "America" seems to be the hypnotic trigger that neutralizes critical faculties. In his own best-selling "L'Ennemi americain: Genealogie de l'antiamericanisme francais" (The American Enemy), Philippe Roger attributes past manifestations of anti-Americanism in France to "a masochist lethargy, a humdrum resentment, a passionless Pavlovian reaction." Thanks in part to the French media, the nation perfected this mental slavery with the nondebate about the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
© Wall Street Journal Europe, November 3, 2003