Speaking truth to authority may have gotten him fired from his post as deputy editor of a respected Roman Catholic daily's website, but it hasn't silenced French journalist Alain Hertoghe. His new book, La Guerre à Outrances, subtitled How the press disinformed us on Iraq, argues that French newspapers recreated "the war they would have liked to have seen."
. . . when the Americans made their move, we read how they were massacring the Iraqis. The explanation for the collapse was that Saddam's fedayeen had so much compassion for the population that they stopped fighting.
. . . Largely ignored in the newspapers that it finds at fault, the book fits into an emerging series of critical analyses in Europe of the European news media's treatment of the war. In Britain, attention has focused on what has been described as the British Broadcasting Company's biased position against British participation.
In the book, Hertoghe cites three factors behind the French press's apparent unanimity:
French anti-Americanism . . . France's nostalgia for its lost status as a great power . . . and "the Arabophilia that reigns among France's deciders and in particular among the journalists specializing in this part of the world."
[via Tim Blair]
Comments