11/25/2004|||110137904631589256||||||

FRENCH PRESS DEPRESSED

Newspaper sales are plummeting and journalists are being fired, reports Alain Hertoghe in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber only). Personally, I like the austere design of Le Monde and the unpredictability of Libération, but would I want to read them every day? Probably not.

"How come the French dailies are among the least read in the Western world? Their high price, pushed up by the archaic printing and distribution monopoly, is the most frequently cited explanation...All this is obviously true. But no one seems to question whether French citizens don't have other deeper motives to give up the habit of buying a daily newspaper. Maybe, just maybe, readers find the traditional press and its judgments boring and uneventful.

"...The French press, of course, congratulated the New York Times and Washington Post for their mea culpas on the shortcomings in the coverage of the Iraq crisis, including on WMDs. But sweep its own doorstep, even though its narration of the Iraqi conflict has been more anti-American than journalistic? No way. It has never seriously investigated the links between Jacques Chirac's France and Saddam Hussein's regime, either.

"...Always deferential to power, be it political, economic or unionized, French dailies have never really undertaken much investigative journalism. But, since the end of the 1980s, they have also given up their ideological identities. There was a time when Le Figaro was conservative, Libération leftist, and Le Monde at the center. Today, they all more or less share the same politically-correct corpus of views, a kind of soft social-democratic way of thinking. As a result, the dailies all look alike, and readers cannot distinguish between them. Democracy, needless to say, suffers from the absence of debate."

UPDATE: The Times has more bad news for the French:

"FRANCE has failed miserably to integrate the millions of Arab and African immigrants who have settled in the country since the 1960s, according to two reports this week. The findings, by the state court of auditors and senior business leaders, confirm a reality that is familiar to everyone in France and highlight the bankruptcy of a state policy that denies the existence of ethnic communities.

"Arab and African immigrants and their descendants have too often been shunted into ghetto-like housing estates and discriminated against over housing, jobs and education, the auditors said....According to the report, young people of Arab and African origin are five times more likely to be unemployed than the rest of the French population."

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/11/french-press-depressed-newspaper-sales.html|||11/25/2004 10:09:00 am|||||||||

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