Free Press in France: The Right to Say What Politicians Want

It took just a few days for Rue89 to emerge as an online refuge for critical political articles and readers suspicious of cozy ties between the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the country’s media barons. Read original article.

The irreverent, six-week-old news site crashed with heavy traffic after publishing an article about the failure of Mr. Sarkozy’s wife, Cécilia, to vote in May in the second round of the presidential election, a scoop too hot for publication by the mainstream Sunday newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche.

“We’ve become a kind of Amnesty International for censored journalists,” said Pierre Haski, a co-founder of the site and a former correspondent for the newspaper Libération.

The debate is an old one in a country where politics, the press and big business have long been intertwined. But the issue of self-censorship has come into sharp relief of late because of declining circulation in the print media and the concentration of media ownership among the new president’s close allies.

Among them are Arnaud Lagardère, who calls Mr. Sarkozy a “brother”; Martin Bouygues, a godfather to Mr. Sarkozy’s 10-year-old son; and Vincent Bolloré, who lent the president his jet and yacht for a postelection holiday.

Mr. Lagardère’s company is a military contractor and media company that owns Le Journal du Dimanche, the only national Sunday paper in France, as well as the glossy magazine Paris Match and Europe 1 radio. Bouygues, a leading global construction company, controls TF1, the leading French network.

Mr. Bolloré’s enterprise is a holding company that controls the digital television channel Direct 8 and owns the free daily Matin Plus jointly with Le Monde.

There is also Bernard Arnault, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the luxury goods company, who was a witness at Mr. Sarkozy’s wedding. He is the owner of the business daily La Tribune.

Mr. Sarkozy’s head of communications, Franck Louvrier, scoffed at the suggestions of undue political influence. “There has never been any interference,” he said. “Every newspaper can write what it wants.”

But in dozens of interviews with French journalists and media executives, a more nuanced picture of French news media has emerged.

Philippe Ridet, who covered Mr. Sarkozy’s presidential campaign for Le Monde, said he never faced direct pressure. But he recalled how after one of his first campaign rallies, Mr. Sarkozy remarked to a select group of reporters, “It’s funny, I know all your bosses.”

A wave of privatizations and the creation of an independent regulator in the 1980s ended routine interference in the news media by the state, but, according to Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, president of the radio network Europe 1, people are still mindful of the past.

“The real subject is self-censorship and excessive zeal,” Mr. Elkabbach said.

Mr. Elkabbach, a veteran journalist who says he has known Mr. Sarkozy for 21 years, has learned the lessons the hard way. After Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected in 1974, he was asked to leave a senior position in television and take up a more junior post in radio. In 1981 under François Mitterrand, he was fired from Antenne 2, the predecessor of the public broadcaster France 2.

Now Mr. Elkabbach himself has been accused of being too friendly with Mr. Sarkozy. On the popular satirical puppet show, “Les Guignols,” Mr. Elkabbach’s dour puppet opens his mouth and speaks with Mr. Sarkozy’s unmistakable voice.

Mr. Lagardère’s Journal du Dimanche became the emblem of self-censorship last month when its editor, Jacques Espérandieu, spiked the article about Cécilia Sarkozy’s failure to vote. Mr. Espérandieu cited privacy concerns, insisting that no one had put pressure on him.

But according to two newsroom witnesses, the editor told journalists that he made the decision after a call from Mr. Lagardère.

Mr. Espérandieu confirmed that he had received telephone calls, but declined to say from whom. A spokesman for Mr. Lagardère did not respond to repeated messages questioning Arnaud Lagardère’s role.

At Paris Match, one reporter summed up the magazine’s informal policy: “We will not run sensitive scoops, we will pick them up after someone else ran them.”

Paris Match has long struggled with the blurry divide between independence and self-censorship. Almost a year ago, the magazine’s chief editor, Alain Genestar, was pushed out by Mr. Lagardère under pressure from Mr. Sarkozy over the magazine’s front-page publication of a photo of Cécilia Sarkozy with her male companion during a time when she was estranged from her husband.

Mr. Genestar said it was a rare case of direct meddling, but one powerful enough to cast a chill on coverage.

Other industry insiders are mindful of his fate.

“You can lose everything,” Mr. Elkabbach said. “People see how hard it is for Genestar to find work.”

Mr. Espérandieu of Dimanche says that these days even the most junior ministers demand to review and amend quotations from interviews. “It is an evolution over the last 10 years or so that does not exactly reinforce the freedom of journalists,” he said.

The new administration does have its critics. The left-leaning and financially ailing Libération is controlled by the banker Édouard de Rothschild, whom Mr. Sarkozy knows well, but the paper campaigned against Mr. Sarkozy’s election.

Online outlets also offer a counterbalance, said Mr. Haski, who founded the Rue89 news site with a handful of former Libération reporters.

But Raphaëlle Bacqué, an investigative journalist at Le Monde, says the debate goes beyond Mr. Sarkozy’s friendly relations with French media barons, and beyond left and right. Ms. Bacqué recently co-wrote a book about how the troubled relationship between Mr. Sarkozy’s Socialist rival in the presidential race, Ségolène Royal, and her companion, François Hollande, affected her unsuccessful campaign.

“She does not have Sarkozy’s connections, and still no one wrote about this stuff during the campaign,” Ms. Bacqué said.