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Books
When Mondes Collide
Has the watchdog of France gone
mad?
LA
FACE CACHÉE DU MONDE:
Du contre-pouvoir aux abus de pouvoir
By Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen
Editions Mille et Une Nuits
631 pp. 24 Euros
REVIEWED BY MARK HUNTER
After two long decades in
which Le Monde led the French assault on corruption in politics
and business — a protracted muckraking era à la française
— the authors Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen, respectively
France’s leading free-lance investigative reporter and a
business editor at the weekly Marianne, charge that it is no longer
the watchdog, but the mad dog of France. The authors claim that
“the place taken by this daily in the life and operations
of the Republic is now decisive,” and that the misuse of
that power is directly responsible for a “degradation of
democratic life in this country.” They aren’t just saying
that Le Monde, with a circulation of over 400,000, sets a biased
agenda for the rest of France’s media, but that it increasingly
creates the events it covers, for its own profit.
The book makes some telling points: Le Monde destroys not only
corrupt politicians, but respectable leaders and citizens, on
the basis of distorted evidence. One passage details how a government
minister was forced to resign after Le Monde used scissor-cut
quotes from his book about his days as the mayor of a rundown
suburb to paint him as a racist. The daily also dictates policies
at the highest levels of power — for example, by intervening
in the government’s attempts to resolve the crisis in Corsica,
including publishing detailed information, apparently leaked by
an ambitious official, that let a suspected Corsican nationalist
assassin escape arrest. Some of these tales are known to anyone
who regularly reads the Parisian press, but Péan and Cohen
have documented them in startling depth and profusion.
Most startling, perhaps, is the revelation that Le Monde trades
its power and pages for cash. In one of the book’s best-documented
chapters, we follow negotiations with the Norwegian media conglomerate,
Schibsted, in 2000, as it sought to launch a free daily newspaper
in France. For Le Monde, the potential rewards included contracts
for its printing plant, a piece of the new daily’s capital,
and a proportional cut of the profits. In exchange, Le Monde promised
to use “all the intellectual means at its disposal”
for the project’s success, specifically including lobbying
among various “actors, institutions, or companies,”
and “public opinion.” The deal fell through, and Le
Monde’s editorial page demanded the “intervention”
of public authorities to stop free dailies, in the name of journalism:
“A question of principle is posed: Does not making information
free devalue it?” Maybe — but then, what was Le Monde
doing with Schibsted in the first place?
A dreadful irony permeates these passages. Le Monde’s founder,
Hubert Beuve-Méry, spent his career trying to set an example
of public service and independence for a French press crippled
by its collaboration with financiers and politicians before 1940,
and with the Nazis immediately thereafter. After founding Le Monde
in the newly liberated offices of an Occupation-era newspaper
in 1944, Beuve-Méry defined his journal’s credo in
an icily proud phrase: “We are poor, and we intend to remain
so.” Le Monde’s strength was that it could not be bought.
After surviving repeated financial crises, it has turned into
a media group that defines its independence differently: Get rich,
so no one can mess with you.
The book sold out its first printing of 20,000 copies within hours
of publication, another 40,000 the first day, not counting copious
extracts in the newsweekly L’Express, and current sales are
estimated at over 250,000, according to the publisher — huge
figures for France. It has generated a massive online debate,
a still rare occurrence in France. Even rarer was an editorial
in which Le Monde, which tends to dismiss criticism unless forced
to respond by legal threats, conceded that a powerful newspaper
may indeed “use its influence ill-advisedly, and it can be
tempted to abuse its power.” Nonetheless, the book’s
chief targets — Le Monde’s director Jean-Marie Colombani,
board director Alain Minc, and editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel —
plus eight other plaintiffs, filed separate lawsuits for defamation,
collectively asking for over $1 million in damages plus publication
of the judgment in numerous journals.
My guess is that Péan and Cohen will find themselves in
trouble when they go to court. (A trial date has not been set,
and the case may not be heard before the winter.) They claim to
perform a public service, “for Le Monde, and against those”
— the plaintiffs — “who brought it where it is
today.” That surely won’t exempt them from the two basic
tests of French libel law, which are to get the story exactly
right or to have shown “good faith” in researching and
telling it. They repeatedly fail both tests. Multiple passages
here are unprovable, badly sourced, or simply outright nasty.
A tidbit gives the general flavor: Plenel is accused of using
his journalism for a Trotskyist party in his youth as an “alibi”
to prove to his father that he was doing something serious in
life while his old man paid his bills. This unsourced insult hardly
explains how Plenel came to play a historic role as the leading
practitioner and theorist of French investigative reporting in
the 1980s.
Cheap shots like these undercut one of the book’s key themes
— that investigative reporting in France has become a public
menace: “This model of a moralizing, policing, even denouncing”
— the French term used here, délateur, retains the
sinister aura it acquired under the Nazis’ boot — “journalism
imposes its law from international news to culture.” The
proclaimed purity of the media’s investigators becomes the
pretext for a new corruption, of power without limit. One example
among many: The authors recount how Le Monde (followed by the
rest of France’s media) trumpeted a highly dubious accusation
of sexual harassment against a prominent intellectual, brought
by a close relation of friends of one of the paper’s directors.
The same charges against
the media emerged in the U.S. after Watergate, but the context
changes the content. The Hidden Face of Le Monde details (though
it is not the first work to do so) how the paper gets nearly all
its scoops: by persuading sources inside the judicial administration
to feed it secret documents from corruption cases. Beginning in
the early 1990s, that technique was used by French reporters and
magistrates to prevent political leaders from quietly smothering
corruption cases. Péan and Cohen argue that it is now used
to blow cases out of proportion: In the fall of 1999, Le Monde
forced the Socialist Minister of Finances, Dominique Strauss-Kahn,
out of office on the ground that any minister who had been indicted
should resign. In fact, though Strauss-Kahn was implicated in
a fraud scandal, he hadn’t been indicted. He was later tried
for having antedated a consulting bill, but was acquitted.
As the authors point out, Le Monde’s pages have become France’s
contemporary Balzac, a feuilleton that readers can follow day
by day. But feeding the daily scoop machine means running a growing
risk of being manipulated by anyone with damaging information,
true or not, about a public figure. Thus rivals of President Jacques
Chirac nearly sabotaged his campaign in 1995 by feeding Le Monde
the phony “news” that he and his wife cut a sweetheart
land deal with a municipal agency of Paris.
The fact remains that before Plenel and a thin platoon of other
reporters made it their business to crack the state’s doings,
France was a country in which very little could be or was said
about the ways of its rulers. Shattering that secrecy was no small
or ignoble feat. But the authors argue that the state legitimately
requires secrecy to go about its work. It’s an argument that
can lead to disaster, as the Pentagon Papers demonstrated in 1971.
But that doesn’t mean it’s totally without merit. Unfortunately,
the authors’ idea of a demonstration is to accuse Plenel
of attacking one of former President François Mitterrand’s
close advisers “because he tried to protect the apparatus
of the State” from Plenel’s “constant incursions.”
In the process, one of Plenel’s historic scoops — that
the French secret services bombed a boat belonging to Greenpeace
at Auckland in 1985, killing one of the passengers — is portrayed
as a mere by-product of a power struggle inside the government,
with Plenel in the role of a manipulated and manipulating mouthpiece.
I’d say a pointless killing went down, and people in high
places let it go down until reporters exposed it. How can you
justify keeping murder secret?
Another charge rings more true: The real investigative work in
Paris isn’t in Le Monde anymore. (One of its staffers candidly
admits, “Our rule is to follow judicial inquiries, we don’t
do our own.”) That honor belongs to reporters like Hervé
Liffran at the weekly Canard Enchaîné, who broke
the story of voting fraud in Paris by computer-assisted analysis
of voter lists. The authors are right in suggesting that Plenel’s
many imitators, at Le Monde and elsewhere, have inherited his
legendary aggressiveness without his talent or his network of
highly-placed sources. The result — just as in the U.S. when
every cub reporter was a wannabe Woodstein — is a bullying,
superficial brand of exposés. Not for nothing do opinion
surveys show that public confidence in the veracity of media reports
is sinking in France.
Do the authors map a better future for French journalism? Not
really, though Péan could have. He practices a method based
on the patient gathering and analysis of public information, followed
by the cultivation of targeted source relationships leading to
material held outside the state. His past exploits include beating
Plenel to the documented facts about Mitterrand’s past as
an official of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime. But he makes
an odd match with Cohen, who belongs to the old polemical tradition
of French reporting. Cohen’s hand shows in a fourteen-page
chapter comparing Le Monde’s published accounts to Enron’s,
based largely on an anonymous financier’s brutal opinions,
at a moment when Le Monde is considering selling shares on the
Paris stock exchange. If this is the future of French investigative
reporting, it’s no improvement.
Has this book changed anything? It has for me. In 1995 I withheld
suing Le Monde after it ran a review of one of my investigative
books. The review, by a staff writer who was criticized in the
work, began with an invented quote and was capped by accusations
that key passages were either “fictive” or politically
motivated. He did not mention my criticism of him to his readers,
and Le Monde never published my reply. But how could I prosecute
a journal that did so much to make my own investigative work in
France possible? Next time, I’ll follow the example of Colombani,
Minc, and Plenel. The bad smell in this book isn’t due only
to the garbage that should have been dumped before publication.
Le Monde is not quite as bad as the authors say, but that isn’t
much of a compliment. We who live in France have lost a public
good, and God knows when we will get it back.
Enjoy
this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
During his
twenty-one years in France, Mark Hunter has either written about,
competed with, and/or written for Pierre Péan, Edwy Plenel,
and Le Monde. This year he won an Investigative Reporters and Editors
award for international reporting.
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