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28 july 2008

French attitudes serve the powerful, but not the people
Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

The country’s strict laws are undermining confidence in the impartiality of the press.


NO wonder Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have moved to France, a paradise for such public figures as the Hollywood stars trying to protect their privacy. Sympathetic locals sigh in disbelief at the savagery of the British tabloid press, particularly since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, which many French people blamed on the paparazzi pursuing her through Paris.

Just wielding a telephoto lens can be enough to land a photographer in court on this side of the Channel; and it would be unthinkable to have a journalistic enterprise that resulted in Max Mosley being filmed - quelle horreur - in what he thought was a private sadomasochistic orgy.

Yet Britain would be wrong to believe that France’s stringent privacy laws have served the public as well as they have served the celebrities hiding behind them. The opposite is true.

The French cult of privacy famously allowed François Mitterrand, the last Socialist president, to keep from the public not only the prostate cancer that was to claim his life but also the existence of a mistress and an illegitimate daughter.

These days the ramparts are crumbling because of the growth of internet gossip and the spread of the “Sarko” revolution: the French media can hardly avoid delving into the privacy of President Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, his glamorous wife, when global attention is glued to them.

Even so, there is lingering devotion to the creed that it is only a politician’s ideas that count and everything else is irrelevant.

Decorum dictates, for example, that articles about Bertrand Delanoë, the Socialist mayor of Paris who is hoping to run for president in 2012, never mention his self-proclaimed homosexuality - even though in political circles everyone is talking about how it will kill his candidacy in the conservative rural areas.

Even the most innocent questions can provoke indignant protestations that this is la vie privée and therefore off limits. No French politician would tolerate the sort of torture that British officials are submitted to at the hands of Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys.

I once made the mistake of asking Danielle Mitterrand, the president’s widow, at what point she had discovered that he had a second family and a mistress. It seemed like a legitimate inquiry but I thought she was going to hit me. “How dare you ask me such a question,” she replied.

When Sarkozy divorced Cécilia, his second wife, in October last year, some of my purist French colleagues would have preferred to keep it out of the papers. But what about the effect it might have on the president? Surely it was in the public interest to know if he was going through a painful divorce?

The privacy law was passed in 1970. It says that “everyone has the right to the respect of private life” and sets out damages for offenders.

Another law makes it illegal to publish anyone’s photograph without the subject’s permission. This makes for a lot of black bars and electronic blotting of faces in the press and television.

Celebrities love it - Catherine Deneuve, the actress famed for her ice queen image, has spent a lot of her career trying to quash rumours about her busy love life - and seldom a week seems to pass without a court ordering thousands of pounds in damages for the infringement of some star’s privacy.

Such transactions seem cloaked in hypocrisy: the celebrities happily pose for the magazines they have sued whenever it suits their purposes. Pitt and Jolie appear determined to prevent unauthorised shots of their twins appearing on the internet because this may diminish the value of the pictures when they come to doing a deal with a magazine, the proceeds of which they will donate to a charity.

Ségolène Royal, the failed Socialist presidential candidate, often complains about invasion of privacy but did not sue a magazine that published pictures of her on the beach in a bikini two summers ago. She was advised that she looked too good in the photograph.

The journalists’ refusal, meanwhile, to share with a wider public what is well known to a select coterie in Paris has undermined confidence in the press, which is now considered more as an extension of power than a check against its abuses.

Devotion to the principle that people’s image and words are protected has led to a tradition for interview subjects - particularly politicians - to edit texts before publication. Mitterrand would often rewrite large chunks of interviews. Nobody ever complained.

French journalists certainly seem good at cultivating their sources. When Paris Match magazine covered the break-up of Royal and François Hollande, the party leader and father of her four children, it did not consider it worth mentioning that the latter’s new girlfriend was one of its reporters.

Similarly, Anne Fulda, a political columnist for Le Figaro, never lets it drop in her analysis of Sarko’s reforms that she is one of his former girlfriends. The Parisian elite is in the know and capable of reading between the lines. The wider public is in the dark.