Tete a tete: Fwench Laugh Riot

One would wonder why the Fwench watch television at all if one went by the story below. However, we picked up on a blog from Aetherland that sets it all in perspective. Compare and decide for yourself.

Our first, the real story, sort of, comes from The Guardian:

Riot coverage 'excessive', says French TV boss

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 TCI, 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.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1639538,00.html ***

For some commentary on this, follow this link to Little Green Footballs: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=18184
_French_Media_Covering_Up_the_Intifada#comments

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Here we found more commentary that really woke us up to points of interest we would have otherwise missed:

http://kurlander.blogspot.com/2005/11/topic-things-in-france-that-are-hot.html
Love the Net!

http://jihadwatch.org, thanks to Borg at November 10, 2005 02:24 PM.

"Rioters are Muslims, but don't say it."
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