The Rise of the Fouille-Merdes

Several times in the past year I've heard French reporters wonder if the news here in Paris is being scripted by Balzac. For example, last year two of then President Fran�ois Mitterrand's close associates -- a high official who'd been hinting to reporters all over town that he knew unspeakable secrets, and one of the gendarmes in Mitterrand's personal intelligence unit -- committed suicide. The gendarme had been indicted for illegal wiretaps on the likes of Carole Bouquet, a movie star, and Edwy Plenel, a reporter at Le Monde. Think of it: two Vince Foster cases, just begging to be blown open. But no special prosecutors or parliamentary commissions investigate such tragedies in this country, and libel laws are especially severe on reporters who impugn the president. So the stories went nowhere.

Investigative journalism is not easily done in France. Still, the death of Mitterrandism, the first movement of the left to hold power in France (from 1981 to 1995) since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958, was sealed largely by an explosion of investigative reporting unprecedented in modern France. Mitterrand said it himself, in one of his last interviews before the right's candidate, Jacques Chirac, won the presidential election on May 14: "What hurt us most was an accumulation of crummy scandals, which undercut our [image of] morality and honesty." He was referring to a decade in which not one month went by without reporters breaking a new scandal, or ripping an old one wider. This journalistic movement is still expanding, and, as we'll see, it is shaking both the political elite and the news industry to their roots.

So there's a clichŽ we have to kill -- the Paris correspondent's joke that French investigative reporting is a contradiction in terms. It's true that the kind of highly documented, data-based in-quiries that Americans undertake barely exist in France. Paris is not Washing- ton, where masses of facts can be easily and legally drawn from public sources. The refusal of France's leaders to share information with their people was first noticed by Julius Caesar, and French bureaucrats still dread being quoted on even innocuous matters. Official secrecy in France covers a huge range of documents, there are no transcriptions or open evidence files in court cases, and public access laws are weak and loophole-ridden.

 This explains why Paris's new investigative reporters tend to work like Drew Pearson in the Eisenhower era -- by cadging leads and classified documents from anonymous sources.

 Given such constraints, it is startling what these reporters have achieved. Although there are only about two dozen of them, they became a real force in 1985, when Minister of Defense Charles Hernu was forced to resign after the daily Le Monde and the weekly L'Express revealed that French secret agents had planted a bomb on a Greenpeace antinuclear craft, killing a photographer on board. Another turning point came after Mitterrand's reelection in 1988, with the story that his private and political associates had profited from inside trades in the government-owned Pechiney company's purchase of American National Can. The investigative storm became a hurricane in 1991, when Anne-Marie Casteret of the weekly L'EvŽnement du jeudi proved that health officials, with the rubber-stamp approval of Mitterrand's ministers, had knowingly sold AIDS-contaminated blood products to at least a thousand hemophiliacs. Two years later, former Prime Minister Pierre BŽrŽgovoy committed suicide after
 he was indirectly implicated in the Pechiney case, and Mitterrand publicly blamed the "dogs" of the press.

In the past year alone, several government ministers and c.e.o.s of government-owned corporations came under fire from the press, resigned, and in a few cases were jailed. This was inconceivable only a decade ago. Just as amazing is that the new investigators have been equally unsparing of public figures on both the left and the right, this in a country whose national press was openly guided by partisan political interests well into the 1980s.

A current scandal offers a textbook example of the obstacles that French investigative reporters have to deal with, and of their growing impact on public opinion. President Chirac had barely taken his oath of office this spring when an undercover reporter for the aggressive morning daily Infomatin bribed his way into the subsidized housing of Paris, where Chirac had been the mayor until May; the story revealed that each ward in Chirac's former domain has its own operative to handle such dealings. Then on June 14, the weekly Canard encha"nŽ reported that the children of Chirac's anointed successor as mayor, Jean Tiberi, were living in subsidized city apartments, instead of the places they had purchased for themselves, which they had rented out at full market value. Two weeks later, the Canard revealed that on Prime Minister Alain JuppŽ's written order, his son had likewise obtained a sweetheart housing deal with the city of Paris.

Unlike the U.S., where 60 Minutes and its clones would be all over this story -- Whitewatergates have been built on less hard evidence -- the housing story drew little notice in the crucial broadcast sector. Why? Probably because the government owns four of the seven TV networks, and the leading private network, TF1, belongs to the Bouygues construction company, which is heavily dependent on government contracts.

 The head of the government-owned France-TŽlŽvision networks, Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, was already on the defensive, having been publicly accused by Chirac during the presidential race of favoring Chirac's campaign rival, Prime Min-ister Edouard Balladur, and perhaps could not afford to take an exposed position on the housing scandal. Likewise, Elkabbach's chief competitor and likely successor in the government TV system, Jean-Marie Cavada, pointedly avoided nailing JuppŽ to the wall about the scandal during an interview for his flagship news show, La marche du si�cle.

The prosecutor of the Republic of Paris ruled in July that since JuppŽ's son, and not JuppŽ himself, benefited from the scheme, there were no grounds to prosecute. At the end of September, however, the scandal made headlines again, as a Ministry of Justice official -- who was about to issue a report defining JuppŽ's action as illegal -- was apparently pressured to resign by the ministry.

Even before the latest turn of events, and despite television's lack of attention, the public's response surprised everyone: in municipal elections on June 18, less than three weeks after Infomatin opened the scandal, the right lost six of Paris's twenty local city halls to the left, which had never before held even one. On the eve of the upset, Chirac's minister of justice, Jacques Toubon, promised revenge, shouting at a TV camera: "I will never surrender to journalistic terrorism!"

It is impossible to say how long this investigative movement will last, but it is certain that these muckrakers embody something largely foreign to the history and culture of French journalism. With few exceptions -- like Bernard Lazare, whose relentless digging played a crucial role in the turn-of-the-century Dreyfus Affair, or Albert Londres, whose firsthand reports from the Cayenne prison colony in the 1920s led to the eventual closing of that tropical gulag -- the French reporter who valued hard-earned facts more than style and commentary was traditionally despised. Even now, the stars of French journalism are mainly commentators or interviewers with limited reporting experience.

Nor has muckraking ever been widely accepted by French society. The French do not assume, as most Americans do, that reporters who uncover official wrongdoing are performing a useful social function. On the contrary, for the past decade surveys have repeatedly shown that nearly two-thirds of the French think their news media are not "independent of political or financial pressures" -- in other words, that they're working on behalf of covert interests. According to Le Monde's director, Jean-Marie Colombani, at least two-thirds of reader mail on his paper's investigative stories is hostile. In comparison, public opinion surveys during and after Watergate showed that only a minority of Americans, mainly Republicans, thought the press had persecuted Richard Nixon.

The French, you see, still remember when their native muckrakers were the worst of the profession's ethical dregs. Some of the best investigations of Paris's pre-World War II press were surely never published, because they were compiled solely to blackmail their subjects, just as many published reports of scandals were simply manufactured, for a price, to smear the enemies of whoever paid it. Those practices continued during the war, when most of France's leading journals collaborated with the Occupant, and they left an ugly memory. As recently as 1987 the popular review Autrement compared investigative reporting to dŽlation, which meant denouncing your neighbors to the Nazis. Even today the familiar term for an investigative reporter in Paris is fouille-merde, or "shit-digger." Complains Le Monde's Plenel, a key figure in the movement: "A part of our own profession sees us as manipulated and scheming -- in short, twisted."

Anne-Marie Casteret's personal story shows how dangerous investigation can be for a reporter's career in this environment. In the U.S. she would probably be as legendary for the contaminated blood affair as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are for Watergate. She took four years to build a massive pyramid of data, from scientific journals and pharmaceutical industry sources, before prying key documents from official sources, then closed in on the contradictions in the cover stories of her targets. Her revelations reached into the heart of the political elite and the national health system, whose benefits are central to the social pact that binds French citizens to their nation. Without her, an awful crime would have remained unpunished.

Yet outside the profession, her name is practically unknown, and inside, she has been persecuted. At the start of her work on the blood case in 1987, she was harassed by government functionaries and her boss at L'Express for pointing to the mere possibility of a scandal, and finally quit her job. When she broke the full story in 1991, not one of her first six articles in L'EvŽnement du jeudi was announced to readers with a cover line, a weird way to present such a major story. This year, after a long campaign of abuse from government and certain journalistic figures, including some colleagues at L'EvŽnement, she quit; she is now doing consumer reports for a TV network. Some of her colleagues were enraged by her fate. In June, a panel of reporters refused to participate in a professional colloquium with a sociologist who had cosigned an obtuse government-funded study attacking Casteret.

Casteret's woes confirm what the sociologist RŽmy Rieffel discovered in his landmark study, L'Elite des journalistes: the top ranks of the profession in France are ignorant of or hostile to investigation, because they would rather be colleagues and confidants of the powers that be. He shows that their chief sources in the government, as well as their social contacts, are mainly drawn from former classmates at Paris's powerhouse grandes Žcoles. Editors often advance by taking temporary government jobs in mid-career, which gives them a direct stake in the government. Because of these deep and varied bonds, writes Rieffel, French news executives "seek above all to explain, to simplify, rather than to denounce or overturn the way things are." The powerful daily Le Figaro's editor-in-chief, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, put it bluntly in a front-page editorial last fall: "We don't take part in manhunts, the new fashion among the journalistic tribe."

This isn't entirely dissimilar to the American press during the cold war, when many editors felt their duty was to protect and justify their government in a time of crisis, until Vietnam showed them otherwise. Even during Watergate more than a few American news executives publicly protested against reporters' loss of "objectivity," and questioned the ethics of an overtly adversarial role. In France, which has a long tradition of political upheaval -- there have been three wobbly Republics and the puppet Vichy State in this century alone, and the extreme right now holds 15 percent of the national electorate -- investigative reporting poses even more painful ethical dilemmas to reporters and editors. Should they pursue the truth at any cost, or try to limit the damage to still-fragile democratic institutions, not to mention to officials who are longtime friends?

That dilemma exploded into the open during the contaminated blood affair, whose effects are still echoing through the courts and the profession. The medical reporter for Le Monde, Jean-Yves Nau, was protective of the chief defendant, Michel Garretta, the Director of the National Center for Blood Transfusions, warning that the scandal could "destabilize and compromise a [health] system founded on altruism and human dignity." But in the end, it was Nau who was compromised, when it was revealed that he previously had accepted a regular salary from an international organization run by Garretta.

Remember that during and after Watergate, too, several American news organizations were obliged to revise their codes of ethics, to banish such practices as receiving gifts or fees from sources, on the principle that the pot can't call the kettle black. The French news industry is being forced to confront the same issue, in a most spectacular way. In April the French Dan Rather, TF1's highly competent anchorman, Patrick Poivre D'Arvor, was convicted of accepting $180,000 in gifts from a political operative, paid for with embezzled funds. Poivre (as he's familiarly known) disputes that sum, and has appealed; meanwhile he remains on the air, with a 43 percent audience share. Though his popularity remains intact, his credibility has been ravaged. A rival anchorman tells the story with delight: on a recent evening, Poivre shot at a politician, "What's the meaning of your indictment?" The pol shot back: "What about yours?"

In private, the editors of Paris's newspapers and networks agree that such conflicts of interest can no longer be tolerated. They understand that the investigative revolution has changed the rules for everyone involved; if reporters and editors can wreck governments, they have to be clean themselves. But in public they avoid the subject, perhaps because cleaning their ethical houses could bring them, individually and collectively, to the edge of ruin.

Quite simply, the French news industry is financially dependent on government support at every level. One reason the Paris housing scandal didn't break sooner is that a number of top editors and reporters live in city-subsidized apartments themselves. More important, without subsidies covering everything from the price of paper to shortfalls in advertising revenue, few journals could survive; in an average year, those subsidies are equal to nearly one-fifth the total advertising revenues of the French press. The government also controls credit to France's newspapers, most of which run at a loss, through its ownership of the major banks. This may be part of what Le Monde's Colombani meant when he remarked in January that investigators "are bringing the press into a very dangerous zone, where powerful interests are involved."

Colombani might also have been alluding to a disquieting new trend: France's courts and the political elite are changing the legal climate in which reporters operate. In a crucial judgment on April 3, the Canard enchainŽ was convicted in the highest court of the land of "receiving stolen tax documents." Its offense? The Canard had published three years of tax returns from Peugeot president Jacques Calvet, proving that at the same time his workers received a 7 percent average wage increase, his own salary rose by 46 percent. The decision created a catch-22: a reporter can publish the information contained in leaked documents, but can't produce the papers, if necessary, in court without being condemned for abetting theft. In press lawyer Jean Martin's ironic phrase -- it's also illegal here to criticize court decisions -- the justices showed "a remarkable intellectual suppleness."

Whatever the final outcome of this case (the Canard is appealing to the European Court of Justice, which has the power to overturn national courts), it is clear, as a high Justice Ministry official puts it, that "there is a new will among public authorities to reduce the possibilities of expression for the French." Literally in the dead of night last November 21, the National Assembly outlawed the publication of even the names or party affiliations of any persons facing indictment, a group which at the time included more than fifty elected officials throughout France, among them some members of the Assembly. The amendment was overturned in the Senate two weeks later; still, in April, the Senate issued a report demanding that prosecutors pursue violations of secrecy laws. Meanwhile the prosecutor of Paris has opened proceedings for "violation of the secrecy of legal proceedings" and "receiving stolen documents" against reporters who revealed the names of suspects in the wave of terrorist bombings that rocked Paris in late summer, all in line with Justice Minier Toubon's mid-June promise of revenge.

Not since the Algerian war, where the government repeatedly censored journals whose coverage undercut the official line, have French journalists played for stakes like these. They have won potent new influence, but they don't yet know the full price they will have to pay for it. And they are more and more aware that the good old days, when reporters and the people in power were friends and allies in a common cause, are over.

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