Paris: Newsroom Politics

LAST BASTILLE DAY, Philippe Labro, a television journalist, made French broadcasting history. It happened during an informal holiday interview given by President Francois Mitterrand to the country’s two largest networks, on the midday news. Upset by the unexpected length of the conversation, Labro, anchorman for one of the host channels, cut the President’s live remarks in mid-sentence and returned to studio programming. Labro’s invited guests for the birthday of the Republic, to whom he devoted the rest of the news, were cats, long-haired and languorous, nestled on plump cushions around the studio.

The next day, Labro was quoted on the front page of Le Figaro, the leading paper in opposition to Mitterrand’s Socialist government, as suggesting that his action was a healthy departure from the “too-reverential” behavior of television journalists in the past. Some others at his network, Antenne 2, saw nothing admirable in it. The incident emerged not as a symbol of independence but as evidence of the tangled and often bitter relations between the government and the three-network television system. The climate of television—regularly described as “poisoned”—is the result of a quarter-century of conservative and Gaullist rule in which high government officials ordered politically useful programs on the air, deleted bothersome ones, and denied political opponents— the left—effective access to the screen.

Ironically, the left played a role in establishing the tradition of government control of television news. In 1956, the Fourth Republic Socialist government of Guy Mollet (in which Mitterrand was minister of justice) created a director of radio and television information to justify its actions in Suez and Algeria. Six years later. President Charles de Gaulle instituted a flatly totalitarian system of news control. At a daily meeting, government ministers, top bureaucrats, and television directors planned the evening news, explicitly defining subjects to promote and themes to forbid—mostly critiques from the left. During this period, the Office of French Radio and Television (ORTF) dominated virtually all broadcasting in France, and provided stability: everyone—employees, audience, and officials—knew what to expect.

In 1974, President Valery Giscard d’Estaing broke the ORTF into seven separate organizations, including the three TV networks, a move prompted in part by the potential threat of a single agency with so much influence on public opinion. Giscard also refined the government’s style of news control, relying less on presidential censorship than on dependable allies at the helm of the broadcasting societies—such as Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, the news director installed at Antenne 2 in 1977. Giscard did not, however, abandon more direct influence: 82 percent of Antenne 2’s journalists declared in a 1978 survey that they had been pressured by government ministers; outspokenly leftist journalists were blacklisted.

Government leaders had clear reasons for adopting these practices. In France, the power of television is particularly concentrated in delivering the news. Newspaper readership is dramatically lower than in Sweden or Britain, for example, and runs at a rate about 25 percent lower than in the United States. In surveys, 39 percent of the French say that TV is their main source of news, a figure that may understate the extent of its impact: the nightly TV news audience is measured at 17 million by leading surveys, total newspaper circulation at 9 million.

Using news as government propaganda was justified by successive regimes with a sort of catechism: 1. The television journalist has special responsibilities. 2. Television is objective. 3. It is the voice of France. This orthodoxy fueled a thirty-year debate among news professionals on the question “Are television journalists the same as other journalists?” The proposed difference, of course, was that as “public servants,“ television journalists had to respect the will of the people—that is, to support their elected leaders. In the name of duty, journalists interviewed high government officials with prearranged questions and answers. Opposition leaders, for years scarcely seen on TV, appeared more frequently after 1974, but the overall coverage almost never permitted harsh criticism of the government.

Newsroom hiring, not surprisingly, became a prerogative of the Hotel Matignon, the prime minister’s office, and television jobs have served in France much as diplomatic assignments do in the United States. Though some television journalists have long been dedicated professionals, the job has often been a reward for political loyalty, a steppingstone to influence, or a placard doré, a gilded closet for bothersome but ineffectual friends. To those on the left, as well as to a considerable number of critics in the press, such journalists were simply carpettes, serviles who cushioned the step of the powerful.

WITH THE ELECTION of the Socialist government, in May of 19b 1, the television system, for so long beyond the reach of its leftist critics, was suddenly theirs. The Socialists prepared to act on their campaign promises to free television from direct political control, and to encourage more originality in programming. But first, with exuberant supporters urging revenge in kind for the years of one-sided news coverage, they did some housecleaning.

Celebrating Mitterrand’s election victory at the Place de la Bastille, an enormous crowd shouted in unison, “Fire Elkabbach!” Two months later, in July of 1981. Elkabbach, a symbol of Giseard’s news manipulation, was ousted. By the end of that summer, the heads of all three television networks and the state radio system had been replaced. In the spring of last year, Jean-Marie Cavada, the only network news chief hired before the election still to have his job, and one of the country’s most energetic and respected TV journalists, was pressured out of office. The price for removing the old government’s appointees was a wave of doubt, even anguish, among the government’s allies in the press.

Although the Socialists refrained from a witch hunt among lower-level broadcast journalists, they did try to change the balance in the newsrooms, by hiring a number of leftist newspaper writers, including several communists, and rehiring others dismissed in the past for political reasons. In the first year, the Socialists hired 1,600 people—about 10 percent of the industry’s work force—in all areas of broadcasting. Unfortunately, since so many of the leftists in the newsroom were either new to TV or returnees who had been absent for as long as a decade, they were not in a position to retool news practices from the bottom up.

In fact, an impressive title, requiring little work, still seems as important as always. With 193 journalists worldwide, Antenne 2 last year counted twenty-four editors in chief and associate editors in chief, the equivalent of American producers; at T.F. 1, its rival network, the proportion of producers to journalists was only slightly lower. And the most durable opinion, one that French journalists have been repeating about each other for years, remains in steady circulation: “Maybe one in four is competent,” says Philippe Chatenay, a foreign news reporter for Antenne 2, voicing for the record what many others will say only in private.

Despite the appearance that on camera not much was changing, government ministers expressed, with scout-like sincerity, the wish “not to do to our political adversaries what they did to us for twenty years.” Mitterrand himself has shrewdly exemplified restraint, appearing infrequently on television—a deliberate contrast to Discard, who never missed a chance to rustle up a TV showcase. Georges Fillioud, minister of communication, moved rapidly to install a commission to plan a new, less political relationship between the government and television. But the Socialists hedged their bet, wary that, with so many entrenched methods still being practiced, the right’s traditional dominance of the medium would continue. They slowed down the pace of reform, with the result that a planned fourmonth transition took more than a year, during which a spirit of hesitation and anxiety settled over the editorial staffs.

When the government passed its “new law of the audiovisual,” last July, after fourteen months in power, it carefully restricted formal independence for television. The law created a High Authority, whose members cannot he fired by the government, to oversee public broadcasting, breaking the direct link between the Elysée Palace and network operations. The authority retains a political aspect: six of its nine members are named by the Socialists, and Michèle Cotta, former director of Radio-France and a prominent Socialist journalist, is its president. But the authority’s choices for new heads of the television and radio networks—the first nominees not named by the president or prime minister—were in general better known for their professional or administrative careers than for political ideology.

INSIDE THE TELEVISION newsrooms, one change is unmistakable. The centralized control of information dramatically broke down after May 10, 1981. “There’s lots of freedom, very little interference,” says Chatenay, at Antenne 2. “The boss might say he doesn’t like the rhythm or timing of a piece, but there are no orders on content.” Journalists throughout the television system, in and out of Paris, reiterate the absence of direct pressure from current superiors or from the government on what or what not to say.

The autonomy of the editorial staffs has, in fact, reached startling levels. “I write all of the copy for the broadcast, and no one reads it before I go on the air,” says Christine Ockrent, anchorwoman of the evening national news on Antenne 2. Ockrent, who once worked for NBC and CBS, contrasts her individual writing with American news, “which is prepared by rewriters with no personal touch.” Other journalists affirm that no editor reviews their copy before it goes on the air.

At Antenne 2, the transformation could hardly be more marked. Elkabbach ran a completely centralized newsroom and sometimes drastically reworked reporting he disapproved of, according to reporters whose work he edited. Although he claimed never to have used it, “extension 61,” a direct line from the newsroom to the Elysée Palace switchboard, remained a notorious fixture of his tenure. His successor, Francois-Henri de Virieu, not only had the line closed but often did not even attend the editorial conferences where story lineups are decided. “Elkabbach was like an abusive father, but he was a fatherfigure nonetheless,” says Laurent Sauerwein, who came to television a year ago from the Communist daily L'Humanite. “We have swung to the opposite extreme—no leadership.”

Speculating on the abrupt end of news management, Chatenay says, “I think it’s because the Socialists don’t know how to control news, after twenty or thirty years out of power.” Former president Giscard, he says, “would underline parts of his speeches and say, ‘If I were you, I’d emphasize this or that.’” Other critics have joked that the Socialists took care of their inexperience by leaving so many old journalists on the job, who by habit went to the ministers’ doorsteps each day.

In the view of some militant Socialists and some in the Communist Party, television has changed for the worse under Mitterrand. Too many concessions have been made, says a reporter at Antenne 2, “to an entertainment concept of the news.” Other proposals to change traditional practices—whether to allow publication of official viewer surveys, for example, or to air more American series— are dismissed by the hard-liners as “attacks on the idea of television as a public service.”

To partisans of a more “Socialist” style of broadcasting, as well as a number of journalists of varied politics, one of Mitterrand’s appointments has come to symbolize the “anti-public-service” problem: Pierre Desgraupes, the head of Antenne 2. A fiercely independent media veteran, fired from TV in 1972 for political sins against the right, Desgraupes defends television as diversion, not pedagogy.

Desgraupes ignored all cues from the government—and from the newsroom— about whom to hire, choosing De Virieu as news director over strenuous objections from both sides. Last September, just as single-handedly, he named Joseph Pasteur, one of his closest associates, to succeed De Virieu. Resentment toward Desgraupes grew further when he suspended Bernard Langlois, a newsman, for commenting on the air that the death of Princess Grace “changes nothing in human destiny.” Despite his unpopularity among journalists, Desgraupes was the only network director reappointed to his post by the newly created High Authority.

AS IN ITS EARLY years, television remains a part-time medium in France. Airing programs only from noon to midnight, TV is not yet the unceasing companion to daily life that it has become in the U.S. And the French watch less of it—an average of two hours and fifteen minutes a day—than the typical American, who, says the A.C. Nielsen rating service, sees four hours and twenty-five minutes a day.

The first major program of a typical broadcast day is the midday news, especially popular in the parts of France outside the largest cities, where many households still gather for lunch. A mixture of dubbed American serials, such as Starsky ei Hutch, talk shows, instructional programs, and after-school cartoons dominates the afternoons on both T.F.I and Antenne 2. In early evening, F.R.3, the network of regional stations, goes on the air, broadcasting twenty minutes of regional news simultaneously on all three networks; there is no other regular local news on television.

Prime time begins with the national evening news, at eight—“the queen program, the locomotive that pulls behind it the grid of programs,” in the words of a critic in Le Monde Diplomatique. The grand journal also attracts—directly before and after it—the most commercials. Evening shows, which usually run an hour, include musical varieties and dramatic series, but the big hits tend to be films, both made for TV and cinema reruns. Not only in prime-time talk shows but in dramatiques, which tend toward lots of anguish but little action, there is an emphasis on conversation in French programming.

Accordingly, much of the TV news in France consists of “talking heads”—up to twelve or fifteen minutes of continuous reading by newscasters. This can become tedious, but in the hands of a first-class reporter, a complicated and non-visual story may get the analytical and historically oriented coverage it deserves, particularly if it concerns international news. The foreign-news reporters clearly feel it is permissible to express their point of view, even if it is not in agreement with the government’s. Journalistic tradition in France has always blurred the distinction between opinion and straight reporting. But touchy domestic matters, such as reversals in economic policy, tend to receive different, sparer treatment. Both government and opposition representatives have their say, but there is less extensive commentary by journalists. In explaining the timidity of the profession at difficult moments, news people blame not government pressure but one of the traditional attitudes in France: that challenging governmental officials is an unnecessary breach of good manners.

In effect, journalists, in print as well as in broadcasting, fear that the public will turn on them if they are too aggressive toward high officials. A survey conducted by Louis Harris for the magazine I’E Express before the last election suggests that the French would rather not know some things about their leaders. Those polled opposed the publication of documents about the past personal behavior of public officials by 49 to 41 percent. Only one in six wanted to know the financial standing of candidates for the presidency.

ALTHOUGH EVERYONE AGREES that there are far too few journalists to cover news in France, any further expansion of news staffs seems questionable. The 8-billion-franc ($1.1 billion) radio-television budget is in financial difficulty, with two of its seven divisions facing a deficit of nearly one billion francs ($142 million). Most of the available remedies in some way challenge the “public service” ideology of television or its long-established practices.

One solution, which the Socialists have already used in part, is to increase advertising on TV. Limited to just eighteen minutes a day on the national networks, commercials have appeared this winter for the first time ever on F.R.3. Despite the seemingly modest time available (a U.S. broadcasters’ code “limited” ads to eight and a half minutes an hour, and the FCC ceiling now in effect permits sixteen minutes an hour), the commercials provide more than 50 percent of the total budgets of Antenne 2 and T.F.I. Both networks have long been turning away potential advertisers because of the time limits; the option to relax them is there if the Socialists want to raise more money. But until fifteen years ago, TV carried no advertising, and the notion that television is a public right, not a sales medium, enjoys strong public support and political safety.

To help raise the 2 billion francs ($285 million) estimated as the cost of the Socialists’ TV reforms, the government has raised the annual fee charged against every TV set in use. The fee, currently 471 francs ($G7) a year for a color set, less for black-and-white, in effect gives the viewer a right to expect good signal reception as a public service.

In response to public pressure for more variety on TV, the government announced last June the creation of a fourth channel. Calling it Channel More, the government proposed making it a vehicle for privately made feature productions and late-night movies for paying subscribers. Among television viewers, there is skepticism about the proposal. “If they show things like The Cultivation of Sugar Beets in Alsace,” observes an engineer involved in technical planning for the channel, “I can assure you, no one will pay.”

Satellites, due to be launched jointly by France and West Germany in 1985, and by Luxembourg in 1986, will increase the number of channels reaching France, and some of them might be run by private broadcasters. Negotiations among European countries are under way to define national airwave rights, with the French considering a $7 billion plan to install a nationwide cable system that would receive and distribute all satellite transmissions, in effect preserving the government monopoly. But recently, Georges Fillioud has spoken of the importance of private production and capital in improving programming. More than any of the earlier plans to loosen the ties between government and television, such statements suggest that the Socialists might leave their mark on French broadcasting by presiding over the debut of private television in the allpublic system.

For a considerable portion of the French viewing public, such an event would be welcome. “Real reform is coming from the sky!” said Science et Vie magazine last spring, listing the variety of satellites that may be beaming signals into French territory in less than three years. There is also the desire among journalists to emulate the independence of the “Anglo-Saxon tradition” of the BBC, in England, which reported war news unfavorable to its government while fighting continued in the Falklands. A private network might well include a news operation.

For some on the left—the militants,

the Communists—Fillioud’s hints of an accommodation with the capitalist media are an abdication of what they see as a mandate to make public institutions promote socialist ideas. A leaflet that appeared in the television studios soon after the Socialist victory expressed their disappointment. “When you are the rightist under the right, you have responsibilities,” the flyer read. “When you are leftist under the right, you are turned out. When you are rightist under the left, you are promoted; and when you are leftist under the left, you must fortify yourself with patience.”

— Daniel Cohen