POLITICS: French Gore
Fund, John H.
POLITICS rJOHN H~ FUND French Gore - • H E NEWS FROM FRANCE HAS BEEN GRIM the last year o r so. First, John Kerry failed to win the U.S. presidential election. As a French official told me...
...France believes it has a point of view, which is not represented in international channels like BBC and CNN--to say nothing of Fox News," says David-Herve Boutin, who helped design the new channel's blueprint...
...Perhaps Prime Minister de Villepin should seek out a strategy meeting with former Vice President M Gore, another politician who has entered the world of cable TV to burnish a fading image...
...Gore's Current TV, a mishmash of news and culture snippets by independent filmmakers, has struggled to attract ads and has been reduced to staging rallies outside cable operators who refuse to carry the station...
...The Chirac government will provide $36 million in start-up financing for the channel, followed by a further $78 million infusion of funds during its first year...
...It will be an awkward partnership between the leading private broadcaster, TF1, and a state network called France T~l~visions...
...It will be broadcast only outside France, in order not to compete with TFI's 24-hour domestic news channel...
...That's news to me, but then poets sometimes imagine the strangest things...
...news channels run by executives who-unlike those in France--don't all share the same worldview...
...If the French give in to temptation, we already know what their coverage of U.S...
...Let us not abandon hope...
...For his part, he told the conference he had decided not to show footage of burning cars but denied he was doing so in "complicity" with authorities who wanted to minimize their failure to contain the violence...
...and British media outlets isn't unified, and to the extent that is true, the output is hostile to much of U.S...
...Iraq was a major moment when we felt quite frustrated that the way we saw the crisis building up was not put out quite fairly by the American media and was often oversimplified and caricatured and sometimes made fun of by folks or other medias," Pierre Rousselin of the newspaper Le Figaro told me...
...So, voil5...
...The French government has come up with a solution: a taxpayer-funded 24-hour international news channel d la CNN that will pres44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 JOHN H, FUND ent the world with all things French...
...For the French, their own shared worldview includes an overriding envy of what they call America's "hyperpower" status...
...We have to enter this game, and fast," he told his colleagues...
...They minimized the atrocities of Saddam's regime and presented Bush as a criminal on the same level as Saddam and Hitler," he wrote...
...The channel will debut late in 2006...
...Despite claims to the contrary, it's hard to see how the new channel will be anything more than a propaganda arm of the French Foreign Ministry, since the ad market for such a station outside France is nonexistent...
...Never has France been so listened to, and never have so many hopes been placed in it," he declared...
...Thankfully, in the U.S...
...The French, on the other hand, tend to have a completely unified approach to their foreign policy...
...The message put out by U.S...
...and British foreign policy and certainly to President Bush...
...In 2003, Villepin announced initial plans for the channel by declaring that the world was thirsting for the French view...
...Programming will initially be solely in French, with the exception of a four-hour block in English...
...As for the prospects for France's version of CNN, even some French officials sound halfhearted about its prospects...
...Although it has nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, of late France has had fewer opportunities than ever to assert its clout in an Anglo Saxon-dominated world...
...Instead, he made his reasoning crystal clear: "Politics in France is heading to the right, and I don't want right-wing politicians back in second or even first place because we showed burning cars...
...Almost every institution in the country saw its reputation blackened by the unrest...
...What would the new venture be called...
...Only 3 percent of the world speaks French, making it just the eleventh most widely spoken language...
...The French, seeking a politically sympathetic outlet in the U.S., arrange a merger with Gore's financially strapped cable channel...
...Jean-Claude Dassier, head of the television news service LCI, told a conference in Amsterdam in November that he viewed the prominence given to the rioters on such international news services as CNN or Sky News as "excessive...
...To increase its influence the channel promises to broadcast someday in other languages-includingArabic and Spanish...
...An independent inquiry found that the BBC had twisted its reportage in a reckless attempt to discredit Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq policy...
...Some French media executives openly conceded that their coverage was driven not by events but by fears as to whom the riots might benefit politically...
...Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres sounded less than thrilled when he briefed doubting members of parliament last fall about the channel's prospects...
...As a French official told me during the campaign, the French government was ~,_ looking forward to a president with French relatives addressing the French Parliament in their tongue-"the sweetest language on the planet...
...Jean-Pierre Tailleur, the author of a book that in 2003, Villepin announced initial plans for the channel by declaring that the world was thiFsting for the FFench view, harshly criticizes the French media, says the coverage of the Iraq War in some French media was almost cartoonish in its opposition...
...we now have multiple U.S...
...President Chirac's hobbyhorse is based on the premise that giant "Anglo-Saxon" news operations such as CNN broadcast news from a perspective that shortchanges the French...
...I can see it now...
...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45...
...John H. Fund, The American Spectator's Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...In other words, headlines like the New York Post's "Axis of Weasels" touched a nerve...
...Every political party in France is suspicious of American influence and motives, and they unanimously opposed the Iraq liberation, which left French officials feeling impotent...
...Then riots swept the country last fall, touched off by the accidental electrocution of two young immigrants who mistakenly thought they were being pursued by police but fueled by alienation in the country's high-rise immigrant slums and Islamic radicals...
...UT THE FRENCH BELIEF t h a t they are losing what *JI--~Chirac calls "the battle of footage" to Anglo_ J J Saxon media behemoths is absurd...
...foreign policy will be like...
...That includes the French media, which alternated between hand-wringing and calling for yet more social programs for the grim neighborhoods where most of the young Muslim rioters live...
...The new channel is in part the brainchild of former foreign minister Dominque de Villepin, the poetdiplomat whose duplicity during the Iraq conflict angered even the most Francophile officials at the State Department...
...French Gore, of course...
Vol. 39 • February 2006 • No. 1
