Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THE FRENCH PRESS Having read Ray Alan's biased reporting on the Algerian war, I am not surprised to see now his equally distorted picture of the French press ("The Fourth Estate of...
...X accuses me of having "sinele-mindedly fought" for "the new Algeria...
...Let us call him X. Students of the genre will recognize a familiar phenomenon...
...Could it be that Alan has not read Jean Cau's reportage in L'Express admitting that the new Algeria, for which L'Express, France-Observateur and Alan have so single-mindedly fought, has absolutely no future (Cau's own words) as an independent country...
...He claims, for example, to have read my reporting of the Algerian War, whereas I never covered the Algerian War...
...It has all the right ingredients: fiction, distortion, obsession, rambling irrelevancy and the illusion that abuse and assertion are a substitute for facts...
...It was the same ghost, incidentally, that duplicated all those definite articles and made a hermaphrodite of Le Canard Encha?®n...
...of] the French press: L'Express and France-Observateur...
...folly and wickedness-because the men behind La Nation fran?§aise and other extremist organs were interested not in solving the Algerian problem but in discrediting and subverting France's democratic institutions...
...Alan finds two exceptions to the generally low level, dishonesty and poor style which, according to him, characterize the French press: L'Express and France-Observateur, two extreme Leftist weeklies...
...applied to the whole list up to and including La Nation fran?§aise...
...DEAR EDITOR THE FRENCH PRESS Having read Ray Alan's biased reporting on the Algerian war, I am not surprised to see now his equally distorted picture of the French press ("The Fourth Estate of the Fifth Republic," NL, October 29...
...He declares that "Alan finds two exceptions to the generally low level...
...Those of my Arab friends who have read my articles and heard my radio commentaries over the years tend to consider me pro-French and proZionist...
...Unable, for some reason, to hurl his vicious epithets at my own paper, the royalist, Catholic weekly La Nation fran?§aise, Alan grotesquely states that its "readers tend to believe that theirs is the one paper that can be trusted...
...The New Leader's office ghost, which dislikes long sentences, tampered with my punctuation here, but even so the meaning would have been clear to X had his mind been receptive to rational English...
...These two papers he characterized as "honest," "courageous," "loyal" and "uncompromising...
...With childish recklessness, X even states that I am a "most loyal" reader of L'Express...
...At first sight, I thought this might be due to his clumsy wording: On reflection, I realize that this is not surprising in a man who writes for an organ which goes as far as it dares in approving the assassins and terrorists of ex-General Salan's Secret Army Organization (the current issue has a fourcolumn feature headlined "Why I Chose the ??AS...
...It was this Right-wing folly which "rid France of Algeria" and caused such appalling hardship to Moslems and Europeans alike...
...Unable to contribute even one new fact to the discussion in which he believes himself to be engaging, X lays down a barrage of diversionary unfacts...
...Molnar is presumably parodying, not Mr...
...Its author-the kind of writer Mr...
...By putting the words "rid" and "for its own good" in quotes, X presumably hopes that the unintelligent reader (i.e., his normal reader) will believe that he is quoting me...
...Nowhere in my article did I make any such statement...
...X even appears to consider words like "honest" and "loyal"-as he puts it-"vicious epithets...
...As for being "contemptuous of France," there can be very few papers published outside the Soviet bloc, Spain and Egypt which are more contemptuous of democracy in general and French democracy in particular-or, incidentally, more anti-American-than La Nation fran?§aise...
...Nor did I "characterize" them as "loyal and uncompromising"-the poor man can't even read...
...Molnar himself, of course-might be a composite of the people who contribute regularly to La Nation fran?§aise, Rivarol, etc...
...Molnar for submitting this delightful pastiche of the sort of silliness with which the low-IQ political weeklies pad out their columns...
...La Nation fran?§aise has predicted this since 1955...
...that anyone who suggested negotiating with the North Africans be smeared as a traitor...
...A genuine journalist would have contacted me to check this point, if it had to be made: He would have discovered that I rarely see the paper (one reason is that I spend a lot of time in places where it is banned...
...My statement about the "loyalty inspired by more or less doctrinaire, and therefore reputedly uncompromising papers like FranceObservateur...
...X describes L'Express as an "extreme Leftist weekly," which is quite untrue: L'Express wavers editorially between Keynesian liberalism and democratic socialism and caters for a prosperous middle-class readership...
...New York Thomas Molnar Correspondent, La Nation fran?§aise Ray Alan replies: I am grateful to Mr...
...Several years ago I published a plan for an overall North African settlement that would have kept the greater part of Algeria a European enclave: This and other constructive suggestions never got off the ground because of the insistence of the pressuregroups represented by papers like La Nation fran?§aise, Rivaro!, Carrefour, L'Aurore, etc...
...Apparently, only readers of L'Expressamong them, most loyally, Alan himself-are justified in trusting their paper...
...It is strange (or, perhaps, not so strange) that those who wanted to "rid" France of its Algerian involvement "for its own good" are usually so contemptuous of France...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 26
