French journalist fired for not toeing the anti-American line

By Tad Trueblood

A French journalist, Alain Hertoghe, has managed to get himself fired from his job with the popular French daily paper La Croix by writing a controversial book about the war in Iraq. The book (published independently from the newspaper and still available only in French) is entitled “La Guerre à Outrances”, which translates roughly as “The All-out War”. The subtitle shows where Monsieur Heroghe got himself into hot water with his bosses. It reads, “How the press misinformed us on Iraq”.

The management of La Croix reportedly took umbrage (“sacre bleu!”) at the book’s expose of biased, inaccurate French press coverage during the early phases of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, Hertoghe said the paper justified firing him because he “demonstrated his opposition to La Croix's editorial line, damaged the reputation of the newspaper and the authority of its chief editors and questioned the professional ethics of some of the paper's staff members.” Hmmm. . . sounds like censorship to me.

In his book, Hertoghe examines the Iraq-war coverage of La Croix and the four largest French papers--Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération and Ouest-France—during three weeks last March and April (the initial “major combat phase”). His overall assessment is that French newspapers reported "the war they would have liked to have seen", and that their misleading portrayals of “Vietnams and Stalingrads that didn’t take place” made it impossible to understand how the Americans won.” He cites many examples, including:

• A total of 135 headlines portraying George Bush or Tony Blair negatively, while only 29 clearly negative headlines about Saddam Hussein appeared.
• The routine ignoring of stories from journalists traveling with U.S. forces—including those of French reporters – when their reports did not reflect grave difficulties.
• Reporting from Le Monde (France’s equivalent of the New York Times) describing Iraqi units in Baghdad as perfectly controlling the tactical situation. The author calls Le Monde “Saddam’s Gazette” for its skewed viewpoint.
• False portrayals of a “massacre” of Iraqi civilians when U.S. forces entered Baghdad, and reports that the Saddam Fedayeen irregulars quit fighting the Americans out of compassion for the civilian population.

According to Hertoghe, the lack of objectivity and clear anti-U.S. bias in the mainstream French press meant that French reporting “fell into predictions of disaster because there were so many who wanted for everything to go wrong. As soon as there were problems on the ground for the United States, it was Vietnam."

There are two reasons why this still obscure book is worth mentioning. First, it illustrates an increasing disconnect between the perceptions (or misperceptions, as the case may be) of most Americans and those of so many Europeans—typified here by the French. It also shows what can happen to both journalistic accuracy and journalistic freedom when a reporter, a newspaper, or a nation’s media sector is captured by a single ideological viewpoint and people are punished for diverging. Americans are certainly not immune from that danger, either.

To date, “La Guerre à Outrances” has been almost completely ignored by French and other European media outlets. There is, however, an encouraging effort by a few European writers and thinkers to engage in some critical self-analysis. An independent media watchdog group in Germany has produced a report critical of misleading and overly anti-U.S. coverage of the Iraq war by the German press, and in the UK there are now increasing calls for more balanced coverage from the BBC. But ah, if you work in the offices of at least one French newspaper, telling it like it is can get you fired, mon cheri.

T.T.

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