Yesterday Chris Maddock asked me the following question, referring to a blog I had written on the 12th January entitled “Chirac’s Endgame?”

“Is this piece in today’s New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/world/europe/01france.html?th&emc=th

relevant and how seriously it should be taken?”

Because I think it merits more than a few lines of comment from me in reply, I’ve decided to do today’s blog on it.

Certainly the piece in the New York Times is relevant. Less, I think, for the content of the interview, which is somehow so grotesque it is hard to take very seriously, than for the different ways the interview has been handled by the American and French press. The Elysée has so far issued two statements, the first is more interesting: Chirac’s people go straight into an attack on the newspapers for publishing the “off-the-record” remarks, particularly since they were rectified later. They claim the manner in which the remarks were reported is “shameful”, a deliberate attempt to “let loose a shameful debate on a subject where France’s commitment has always been constant and determined. It does not surprise us,” the statement continues, “on the part of certain media on the other side of the Atlantic which seizes any opportunity where France is concerned.” Perhaps seeing that this did not raise a flicker of anti-American braying from their compatriots, the Elysée issued a second statement, this time trying to rectify the damage done by Chirac’s first interview.

Staying on the French side of the Atlantic, both the Nouvel Observateur, one of the parties to the interviews, and Le Monde in its editorial this morning, comment only on the content. Le Monde takes at face value Chirac’s first interview statements about Israel being Iran’s target and Tehran being “razed before any missile has gone more than 200 metres”. Le Monde agonises over whether this is a change of direction in French foreign policy, wondering how can this be since it flies in the face of what Chirac has said before etc. It assumes that everything the president said, even in the first interview, is gospel. Certainly if you take that view and you haven’t read the New York Times’ version, the interviews are confusing.

The strength of the NYT piece is that it sets the controversial remarks in their context:

“The purpose of the initial interview was for Mr. Chirac to talk about climate change…..In the first interview, which took place in the late morning, he appeared distracted at times, grasping for names and dates and relying on advisers to fill in the blanks. His hands shook slightly. When he spoke about climate change, he read from prepared talking points printed in large letters and highlighted in yellow and pink.”

None of this is mentioned in the French press. They may consider it demeaning to talk of their president in these terms, but it is a far better and more compassionate explanation.

“Mr. Chirac,” the NYT goes one, “who is 74 and months away from ending his second term as president, suffered a neurological episode in 2005 and is said by French officials to have become much less precise in conversation…… In the midst of his initial remarks on Iran, Mr. Chirac’s spokesman passed him a handwritten note, which Mr. Chirac read aloud. “Yes, he’s telling me that we have to go back to the environment,” Mr. Chirac said. He then continued a discussion of Shiite Muslims……..

“On Tuesday, Mr. Chirac summoned the same journalists back to Élysée Palace to retract many of his remarks.

“The president had a different demeanour during the two encounters………. in the second, which came just after lunch, he appeared both confident and comfortable with the subject matter.

“Mr. Chirac said repeatedly during the second interview that he had spoken casually and quickly the day before because he believed he had been talking about Iran off the record.

“ “I should rather have paid attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on the record,” he said……Mr. Chirac spent much of the second interview refining his remarks of the previous day.” The NYT quotes the various comments from the first interview which he retracted in the second.

“It was unclear whether Mr. Chirac’s initial remarks reflected what he truly believes,” says the American newspaper. “In fact, Élysée Palace prepared a heavily edited 19-page transcript of the Monday interview that excluded Mr. Chirac’s assessment of a nuclear-armed Iran.

“The transcript even inserted a line that Mr. Chirac had not said that read, “I do not see what type of scenario could justify Iran’s recourse to an atomic bomb.”

Finally the New York Times says: “The attempt by Élysée Palace to change the president’s remarks in a formal text is not unusual. It is a long-held tradition in French journalism for interview subjects — from the president to business and cultural figures — to be given the opportunity to edit the texts of question-and-answer interviews before publication.”

Anyone reading the NYT piece can see that the man was ill, or distracted, unless of course I am being naively duped and the NYT’s journalist is interpreting the moment very creatively. If so, I am not aware her version has been contradicted by either of the other two journalists present. In this particular interview those details are crucial and cast an entirely different light on the words spoken.

Le Monde this morning does not try to duck the issue, it compares the text of the two interviews, so the differences can be plainly seen, and M. Chirac’s retractions are fully expressed as such. Le Nouvel Observateur publishes verbatim extracts of the two interviews, but the first, the contentious one, is restricted to two answers from what was clearly something much longer. In the “verbatim” account of the second interview there’s a touchingly naive moment when we read; “end of the 1^st side of the Nouvel Observateur’s cassette”. Even when interviewing the head of state, the Nouvel Obs’ journalist can’t run to digital. But despite all this, the article in the Nouvel Obs omits all the details given by the NYT, for example the journalist does not mention the 19 page re-edited transcript of the interview, nor refer to Chirac’s dependence on spokesmen.

It would be interesting to know whether the French weekly magazine would have published the controversial comments at all had it been alone in the venture. Knowing the two American papers were going to tell all, the French editor had no choice.

This mini-event is interesting in that it highlights the two different approaches to journalism. Many people have said that French journalists are too meek before their mighty elite: the various income tax allowances and hefty state subsidies are invoked as part of the reason for this, or the notorious pensée unique, meaning in effect that editors and those in power are in cahoots. It’s not entirely true, there are some very good investigative journalists in France, and some, admittedly independent like Denis Robert, are extremely courageous. What French editors don’t seem to have grasped is that their readers are mostly intelligent, perceptive adults, getting their information from all sorts of sources, some reliable, some less so. You can no longer get away with half-truths. If you know that the person you are interviewing is in some way indisposed, or even is simply being fed notes from advisers, giving the impression that the person has no opinion of his/her own, it’s irresponsible not to say so. Because someone else will.

But to answer Chris Maddock’s question: I think it puts Chirac’s endgame in tatters.

By the time television latches-on to something and starts getting breathless about it, you can be sure that something is either past its sell-by date or is in someway a threat to television itself - for the best way to kill anything is to let TV presenters gush about it. Is that what is happening at the moment to participative democracy?

Suddenly the media are prostrating themselves before “la sagesse du peuple” with almost indecent haste. Every French radio station has announced a series of innovating programmes with state of the art titles like “Les candidates face aux auditeurs”, “Air libre” or “Service public”, in which ordinary but selected people can go head to head with, and can actually ask questions of, the man or woman who may be the next president. On television it’s even worse: sheep-like, all the channels are trotting along the line given by France 2’s director of information: “[During the election campaign] we want the maximum number of French people to participate”. Her channel is producing “A vous de juger” in which two candidates’ representatives (not the candidates themselves) slug it out in front of a jury of ten “witnesses”. On sister channels you can watch “Français, votez pour moi!”, as “candidates are confronted with reality”, something then defined as “meeting French citizens, with all their experience of life and powerful convictions.” The flagship TF1 is pitting each of the main candidates against 100 of their “ordinary” compatriots. Why 100? How many questions can be properly answered in an hour, dodging commercials? Fifteen?

In other words France is going to be inundated with people’s democracy until everyone is heartily sick of it, fulfilling Churchill’s “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Which is a terrible shame. Participative democracy is a good idea, but it’s fragile and not a panacea for all the problems which so many western countries now face. It’s true it works best at the local level, when the people concerned know what is at stake, but even in a presidential election, if used wisely, it can stem the tide of disillusion with existing politics, get people implicated in the running of their lives or at the very least get them back into the voting booths.

Far more relevant for this election, I think, is the power of French political blogs, the 5^th power in France. If you want to look at the diversity on offer, start with BonVote, which classifies the top 100 most influential sites (out of the 1,436 sites scrutinised). BonVote also publishes its Top Buzz, counting the number of times each candidate is referred to on the net, for good or bad, in other words the noise each one generates. The current weekly evaluation shows Sarkozy at the top, followed by Royal, and then way below Michèle Alliot-Marie, François Bayrou et al. There is also a monthly version, drawn as a long tail: we can see that during January Ségolène Royal comes in first with 32,252 mentions (on the internet), Sarkozy now second with 26,807. Then it dips considerably: Chirac is third with 9,297. Other non-candidates follow until François Bayrou appears at 10^th position with 3,452 mentions, ahead of Nicolas Pont-Aignan and Le Pen with 3,363. Rachid Nekkaz, an excellent “petit” candidate, gets only 20 mentions (now 21). You can see the incredible gap: Sego get 10 times more mentions than Bayrou or Le Pen, who are jostling for third position in the actual race. It may well be that 9/10 of the battle is just to get people talking about you, particularly on the net. BonVote also shows how many sites are gathered round each party: the socialists have 255 sites, the UMP 157, the Greens a mere 32 and the FN 14 – but they don’t need the internet. The Greens do, however, and will never make headway on 32 sites.

Most of the best independent sites are listed on the right: Thierry Crouzet I find very good, Loïc Lemeur is considered the doyen of French bloggers and he has an English site. He has come down on Sarkozy’s side, Crouzet I think is more neutral. Thierry Maillet’s site is good too, and Nicolas Voisin’s Nuesblog. Reading them can be like a breath of fresh air, because they are not strait-jacketed by la pensée unique and indeed they are not always about the election. They are not necessarily interested in party politics, but often concerned more with deeper issues -  such as people’s democracy.

There is also a very good citizen’s newspaper, AgoraVox, which has an English version too, but since that is written by English-speakers, the centre of interest is mainly on the other side of the Atlantic and the French election features very little.