French TV boss admits censoring riot coverage

Claire Cozens in Amsterdam
Thursday November 10, 2005

One of France's leading TV news executives has admitted censoring his coverage of the riots in the country for fear of encouraging support for far-right politicians.

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service LCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been "excessive" and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.

Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

"Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television," Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

"Having satellites trained on towns across France 24 hours a day showing the violence would have been wrong and totally disproportionate ... Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you're broadcasting," he said.

Mr Dassier denied he was guilty of "complicity" with the French authorities, which this week invoked an extraordinary state-of-emergency law passed during the country's war with Algeria 50 years ago.
But he admitted his decision was partly motivated by a desire to avoid encouraging the resurgence of extreme rightwing views in France.

French broadcasters have faced criticism for their lack of coverage of the country's worst civil unrest in decades. Public television station France 3 has stopped broadcasting the numbers of torched cars while other TV stations are considering following suit.

"Do we send teams of journalists because cars are burning, or are the cars burning because we sent teams of journalists?" asked Patrick Lecocq, editor-in-chief of France 2.

Rival news organisations today questioned the French broadcasters' decision to temper coverage of the riots.
John Ryley, the executive editor of Sky News, said his channel would have handled a similar story in Britain very differently.

"We would have been all over it like a cheap suit. We would have monstered the story, and I didn't get the impression that happened in France," he said.

This is very much in line with media elsewhere in Western Europe, although this is perhaps the clearest case I've seen. The hush-hush mentality surrounding immigration-related issues is once more clearly witnessed. In Holland it was thought as necessary to discuss what goes on in Guantamo bay, even when it would add fuel to the flames of Islamic extremism, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali is criticized for adding fuel to the flames of right-wing extemism.

That media believes it has some sort of responsibility to control peoples' political views is beyond me. Because they think showing what was going on might change the way people think, it shouldn't be shown? I think it is their job to show us what is going on so that we can ourselves form an opinion, whatever that opinion may be. If coverage is one sided and omits certain factors, I think that could be called indoctrination. And that is what is going on, at some level, in most of Western Europe.

We live in a societ that prides itself on freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of opinion. Indoctrination on the other hand is something we know from studying totalitarian regimes. This sort of indoctrination may not be state controlled, but it certainly is not disaproved by the current leftist political elite that has put us on the road to multicultural paradise.