Sarkozy To French Media: 'If You Don’t Like To See Pictures of Me With My Girlfriend (Fiancé) Then Don’t Send a Photographer. We Are Not Going To Hide'

Philip M. Stone January 9, 2008

Confidence oozed from French President Nicolas Sarkozy at his Tuesday news conference and the focus of the world’s media concentrated on when he was going to marry his supermodel girlfriend. That means his fascinating chastisements of the media, and some of his proposed solutions to heal the ailments of the French media business didn’t break through those headlines but they are important as one charts the future of the French media

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The headlines, of course, centered on will he/won’t he marry former super model Carla Bruni, and isn’t he somewhat ashamed of himself for flaunting her on recent foreign trips, and what are the Indians to do with her on that state visit later this month? And with that Sarkozy went on a “Vive La France” offensive saying he was surprised that was the second question asked at the  news conference and he was sure it was going to be the first!

He said he and Bruni had discussed all the attention they were getting and they had decided they were not going to lie or hide. He was not about to slip into or out of her room at dawn or dusk. They were a couple and so be it. If the French media is somehow offended by pictures of the two together – whether it was recently at Disneyland Paris or on an after-Christmas visit to Egypt – “then don’t send a photographer” He used that line several times.

Can’t you just see President Bush telling American media that the solution to not seeing pictures of him doing something they didn’t approve of was for them not to send photographers!

But Sarkozy made his point with much conviction – he and Bruni are a couple, they probably will get married before the media finds out about it (to which a clever reporter immediately asked if they were already married and got the “non” answer) , and he reiterated several times the couple were not about to hide. “Carla and I have decided not to lie,” the inference being that former occupants of the Élysée Palace have not been so honest (President Mitterand actually had a second family).

Changing subjects, he was asked what the government was doing to protect French journalists overseas who have been imprisoned and he said the government always does what it can, but he made the point that on a November visit to Chad he brought back to France three French journalists who had been imprisoned there and he said that quite frankly the French media really didn’t thank him very much for those efforts. Touché!

And he got into a discussion about the state of the French newspaper industry and it was fairly obvious he had been very well briefed by his industrialist friends who over the years have invested big sums in such national newspapers  as Le Figaro, Le Monde and Libération to save them from bankruptcy , and, there have always been suspicions, to gain more influence within the government

It was as if he was taking a leaf out of previous ftm stories as he explained he saw the problem as being two-fold: that so many kiosks and newsstands have closed down over the years that “a reader has to go out of his way these days to buy a newspaper,” and the second problem was the country’s antiquated newspaper circulation system.

French national publishers have complained in the past that if they wanted to sell newspapers in the South of France in the morning then that newspaper had to be off the presses by 4 p.m. the day before, so slow and antiquated was national circulation. So if one wanted to read coverage of the nighttime football game and one lived outside of Paris then one would probably buy the provincial newspaper with later deadlines and not the national newspaper.

Since the industrialists have come in there has been investment in more printing plants around the country, but the circulation system is still a great embarrassment.

France is not shy in subsidizing its newspaper industry, it spends some €300 million a year doing that in such ways as 50% reductions in communication charges, cut-price mail delivery, cut-price travel, providing partial building funds, keeping newsprint costs low, 0 corporation tax if the money is reinvested within five years and 0 VAT. It even keeps the AFP news agency in business via very substantial government contracts, thus providing the media with a low cost national and international news agency.

Sarkozy said his government was going to take a look at circulation and do something about it. He didn’t say what but the likelihood is that there will be government incentives if not subsidies to fix the problem.

And he also turned his attention to how France is seen internationally via French media established for that purpose – TV5, general interest programming in French mostly supported by France  but with Belgian, Swiss, and French-Canadian financial contributions, Radio France International (RFI) and France 24, Jacques Chirac’s creation of a 24-hour all news TV station to present the French point of view globally. Sarkozy said all had problems of one sort of another – he seemed to be saying RFI had editorial woes, France 24 was a fine editorial product but it just was not being seen in many global homes, and TV5 had financial issues. His solution, he said, is to bring all of them under one umbrella.

He sounded very Chirac when he said he was not interested in investing in any channel that was not broadcasting in French although subtitles in Spanish and Arabic and the like were ok, but although unclear one assumes those comments were not directed at the English and other language outputs of France 24.

Indeed if one takes France 24’s coverage of the two-hour Sarkozy news conference then the French government has to admit it was getting some value for its huge investment. FTM watched the France 24 coverage on the Geneva, Switzerland, cable system. The station offered simultaneous English translation and from the different voices heard it sounded as though it had at least three such translators at work.

So when Sarkozy started emphasizing how important he believed it was to get the French point of view across globally ftm flipped to CNN to see if it was covering the news conference live. No, it was regular programming. Then to BBC World. No, it was regular programming. Well, surely EuroNews, but no it, too, was regular programming. So it would seem on an international basis, for a non-French speaker to know what Sarkozy was talking about the only option was France 24, and before that network launched about a year ago Sarkozy’s full comments just would not have had global distribution. With that in mind, extended station carriage deals would seem to be a priority.

Sarkozy also commented on the French television business and that caused a positive stir on the stock market with shares in television companies getting a healthy lift. Sarkozy said he didn’t think that public television stations (the two most prominent being Antenne 2 and France 3) should continue being supported by advertising and instead he favored that they be financed by a tax on the commercial earnings of the private commercial companies. That saw the shares in the country’s most popular commercial station, TF1, close up 9.94% after having been up by as much as 15% during the day and M6 Metropole TV closing up 4.49%.

Television advertising has been in the dumps in France for several years and if suddenly the  €1.18 billion ($1.72 billion) now taken in by the French public broadcasting channels were now to go to the commercial stations then that’s a real bonanza. The big question, however, is deciding the amount of the levy on those commercial revenues to support the public broadcasters and that, no doubt, will be  one wail of a fight.

If all of this could be taken on face value then one could form an opinion that Sarkozy is trying to do what he thinks is best for all France as he talks about the newspaper and broadcast business. But because of his personal relationships with many of the industrialists who own media properties, and because he is not shy in accepting favors from them such as free use of their company jets and free use of their foreign estates, there is always the suspicion  -- which the French public is now becoming more concerned about if the media is to be believed – that there is a bit of quid pro quo going on here.

He is fixing the newspaper circulation business because his buddies own the newspapers and give him personal favors; he is helping the commercial television business because his buddies are into commercial television -- none of those inferences may, in fact,  be true but his actions allow it to be perceived and it is such an unnecessary crack in the Sarkozy mirror. 

There was one other Sarkozy comment at the news conference that deserves mention for it shows just how down-to-earth this man is. A reporter from Libération, the left-wing newspaper that is about as opposed to Sarkozy’s policies as a newspaper can be, told him that he was treating the Presidency as a monarchy and asked him to explain himself.

Sarkozy’s response was to answer the question with a question. “Who do you think I am? Jacques Chirac’s illegitimate son?”

So much for an inherited monarchy.