Charles Bremner, of the UK Times, is in the thick of the campaign and in my book at least, offers one of the best journo-blogs in cyberspace.
Today's entry on Segolene is especially a treat...
Gordon who???
Charles Bremner, of the UK Times, is in the thick of the campaign and in my book at least, offers one of the best journo-blogs in cyberspace.
Today's entry on Segolene is especially a treat...
Gordon who???
March 30, 2007 in French Election, Media, Segolene | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Drudge Report is the nerve center of American journalism (love it or loathe it), and Segolene Royal is featured (with this classy picture!) with this headline linking to a Financial Times article:
ELECTION UPSET? FEMALE FADES IN FRANCE...
Segolene struggles have now become conventional wisdom in the US.
March 13, 2007 in French Election, Media, Segolene | Permalink | Comments (0)
He loves me. Well not me, I'm not French. But he loves you, the French citizen.
What an amazing media moment that was. While the election gets bogged down in theorizing a way out of the alleged great decline of France as we know it, Chirac climbs into his love rocket and blasts himself into that great heaven of history. It was difficult not to be moved by the sheer elegance of the whole thing, against all odds.
I know you'll miss me, he seemed to be saying, and by god, perhaps we will. I kind of do already.
And in that spirit, Jean Michel Aphatie picks his Chirac highlights, leading with one that's hard to disagree with (but before he was even president): Chirac's endorsement of the yes in the Maastrich referendum that brought on the euro. Chirac turned his back on his right wing allies and went along with Mitterand and the 'yes' won by a sneeze .
If it wasn't for Chirac, then, the euro, that great down payment on a European political future, would not exist today. That's huge.
Le Monde, continuing its recent offensive into covering the coverage, summarizes the usual anglo-American Chirac dismissals. The Daily Telegraph sure won't have Chirac to kick around anymore which leads me to think that Fleet Street's vote pick is Segolene, since they seem to like to push her around more than the others.
March 12, 2007 in Chirac, French Election, Media | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Michel Polnareff comeback here is totally huge. Mythic, and yet another example of how the babyboomers (and their nostalgia in this case) still run the show.
Peggy Noonan is a conservative columnist and excellent portraitist of power, even if you don't care for her politics. In an excellent column about the Hillary Clinton / Barak Obama dust-up, she wrote something that made me think about politics in France and the French people's supposed disinterset in character issues (which I think is untrue).
But Americans have always--always--looked at and judged the character and personality of their candidates for president. And they have been right to do so. It mattered that Lincoln was Honest Abe, Washington had no personal lust for power, that FDR was an optimist and a manipulator, that Adams was a man of rectitude and no small amount of stubbornness. These facts, these aspects of their nature, had policy implications and leadership implications. They couldn't be more pertinent. They still are.
She's describing why David Geffen's take-down of Hillary was definitely a negative for her, but to me, she also reminds you of why 12 years of Chirac leads France to the existential crisis it finds itself in. Had journalists in 1995 or 2002 divulged HALF of what they left in their notebooks, the French people would have had a far better idea of what to expect from him as a president, for better or worse.
February 23, 2007 in Chirac, French Election, Media | Permalink | Comments (0)
The effects of the Alain Duhamel debacle are continuing to reverberate.
Ever since France's premiere political journalist was recused from commenting the election on RTL, the major radio station, all the news organizations have regrouped into irregular behavior.
They've turned to confessional (it's a Catholic country afterall!). Because even though Duhamel's suspension wasn't really about how reporters do their work, top writers at Le Monde, journalists at RTL, and editors at l'Express, have spontaneously begun to dissect their work days for all the world to read.
Here, you can find a Le Monde writer describe what its like tracking Sarkozy. And here, Segolene. Amazing articles both.
On this blog , RTL's Jean Michel Apathie describes what happened off the air this morning with Sarkozy. And finally, Renaud Revel of l'Express, (whose recent book on Claude Chirac -the daughter- dishes with gusto), blogs in sort of defense of Duhamel and other oldies.
It's becoming increasingly clear by the day that the election of 2007 is doing to French journalism what post-Iraq did in the US. It's not obvious where it will all land, but at the very least, something tells me we'll be seeing editorial email addresses even in Le Monde soon... Who would have ever imagined.
(And as a side note, a French journalism student, working on this blog tracking election coverage, told me that newspaper editors are especially excited to hear about "this online journalism thing" when talking to prospective hires.)
February 21, 2007 in Media | Permalink | Comments (0)
This is the big time folks.
At about 7pm Paris time, below was on Drudge Report, just below the headline.
France's Le Pen: 9/11 attacks 'an incident'...
In response to the frequent question if Americans are taking any interest in the French election, as long as Drudge keeps that on the page, they are.
And what else is on there?
France Invaded by Swarms of Giant Hornets - Global Warming Blamed
Now you know.
Link: DRUDGE REPORT 2007®.
February 21, 2007 in Media | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sego was on TF1's "I have a question to ask you" show last night, which is what Americans would call a "town hall meeting" where "real people" ask "real questions" to politicians.
Say what you will about Segolene, but, according to the radio station playing in the newspaper shop this morning, she scored about the same audience as Nicolas Sarkozy's performance on the same show two weeks ago (over six million viewers).
[UPDATE: Wow. She scored 8.9 million, against Sarko's 8 million. Twenty euros says there's a crisis meeting taking place at the UMP right this second.]
And that's news. A whole coterie of candidates (including Le Pen) scored only 6 million pairs of eyeballs last week. Interest is still very high for Segolene and you can be sure that Sarkozy is placing much more importance in those ratings results than in the polls.
In other TF1 news, news director Robert Namias went very public yesterday with a vow that the close friendship beween his boss, Martin Bouyges, and Nicolas Sarkozy has no bearing on the network's editorial line. Conincedentally (or not), Le Monde ran an article yesterday delineating Sarkozy's 25-year relationship with the media and more specifically, France's media barons.
Tha article begins with the line Sarko is known to open a press gaggle with:
"It's funny. I know all of your bosses."
Classy.
February 20, 2007 in French Election, Media, Sarkozy, Segolene | Permalink | Comments (0)
Courtesy of Boz, here's an article in the London Sunday Times that highlights the 'good bits' in a series of gossip books recently released here in France.
It's pretty ugly, but I certainly think French voters had a right to know at the very least that Chirac's daughter was suffering severely from mental illness during all these years. (Just like I think that they should have known Mitterand had a Mazarine.)
February 18, 2007 in Chirac, Media | Permalink | Comments (0)
France's senior political reporter, Alain Duhamel, was forced to recuse himself from editorialising on the 2007 election because of the mass distribution of a web video from last Novemeber where he tells a Science-Po auditorium that he plans on voting for Francois Bayrou, the centrist candidiate. (Here's the Guy Birenbaum blog entry and video that started it all).
This could have been predicted. While it's obviously inappropraite for a journalist of his reknown to plainly support a candidate, Duhamel's real crime is for being perceived by the rebellious blogosphere as a pompous ass of the old school of political journalism. Duhamel is a man who prides himself for having never once turned on a computer and yet has been an ever presence of French television and radio for generations.
He is also the man who penned a curtain-raiser book for the 2007 election without including Segolene Royal because she wasn't either the head of a political machine or a leader of a party, he later argued. He added her, scathingly, in a recent reissue of the book.
Mainstream journalists and polticians are all offering support to Duhamel, but the Parisian chattering class is severely disoriented. Just at the moment when political journalists think they are about to do their most serious work, the culture turns on them. The public-at-large simply doesn't trust the same faces or news sources that they used to.
And that may be Duhamel's most serious crime of all: He's 66 years-old. As the disgraced businessman and former minister , Bernard Tapie, said in the Parisien today, this election is about a long, long overdue passing of the torch:
In one fell swoop we are about to go from a society made by old people for old people, to a society of young people that totally disagrees with old people on just about everything.
Duhamel -because he'd never turned on a computer and is surrounded by a whole network of other powerful 'old people' (including Dominique Strauss Kahn, every banker's favorite leftist, who defended Duhamel to high heaven Friday)- never saw this coming.
February 18, 2007 in French Election, Media | Permalink | Comments (0)