Mme Dati over-doing the authoritarian angle?
There’s a fascinating video on the site of the ultra-prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. It shows what may be a portent of a coming trend: physically preventing independent – particularly internet – TV journalists from filming at public meetings where members of government are speaking. In this video we watch, from the inside, the frustrated (and deeply frustrating) efforts of a TeleLibre cameraman trying to record a public meeting at which the Minister of Justice, Rachida Dati, is going to speak. Everytime he starts filming, a huge shoulder comes in front of the lens to block him out. The camera moves, the shoulder moves with it. After a while we see the director trying (it seems politely) to clear a little space. But the owners of the shoulders (there are several) will not budge. Several young and not-so-young faces, all nicely groomed and impeccably correct, grin smugly at the camera or the increasingly frantic director. They seem to be acting in concert. We assume they are militant supporters of Mme Dati and the UMP. After a while we feel the camera being pushed sideways and suddenly it is out in the entrance hall where others, putting their hands over the lens presumably to avoid identification, apparently hustle the cameraman and his director out into the street.
Recently cameras have caught politicians saying things in public they perhaps shouldn’t have said – the most notorious case being President Sarkozy at the Salon d’Agriculture telling a member of the public to get stuffed. Within hours the video was on the internet and the President’s off-the-cuff remark was once again pushing far more important pieces of news off the slate. His minister for Human Rights was caught at a public (local) meeting saying embarrassing things, as other UMP stalwarts have been too. “La petite phrase” filmed and posted on the web has become a major bugbear for the party in power (and was for the Socialist opposition too during the presidential election campaign). Ironical of course, a case of l’arroseur arrosé, since President Sarkozy’s manipulation of the press is one of his greatest strengths.
So here is the web confirming its role as an (perhaps the only?) independent force, leader of the anonymous opposition, showing us aspects of our leaders which they would rather we did not see. The web doesn’t do so well in the hands of those in or seeking power – with a few exceptions the web-sites of the candidates for the local elections have been ignored, perhaps too parochial – but it blossoms as a purveyor of scurrilous material potentially dangerous to those in power. I know nothing about TeleLibre except that it seems to be a video equivalent of AgoraVox, a web-based citizen’s newspaper. This video is posted by a highly qualified researcher at one of the grandes écoles to make a serious sociological point.
The wider implication of the video is obvious: web journalism (independent and thus uncontrollable) has such a huge (and often gullible) audience that if someone does not want these literally free-lance reporters filming at his or her meeting they enlist the backs, shoulders and elbows of their supporters, who clearly relish the chance to flex their muscles. While far from new, the technique is very dangerous for us all. Or of course this particular video could all too easily be faked – that’s the problem with all web journalism.