The Tartuffes of the Media

The outspoken founder of Reporters without Borders, Robert Ménard (above) who denounced the French media for not revealing the real name and religion of the murderer of 13-year-old Kylian, has himself been fired by iTélé after two and a half years of partnership with Canal Plus, a left-leaning television channel. He declared:

"I am disappointed and angry. Just a few weeks ago, Cécilia Ragueneau, the CEO of iTélé assured me that everything was all right. But it's true, the times dictate conformity… not impertinence. What can you expect, the lack of courage, the fear of offending someone, pressures, all of that is too much for some people." (…)

Now Robert Ménard has words for the hypocritical media that, on grounds of "freedom of the press", released the transcripts of Mohamed Merah during the stand-off in Toulouse:

"Right to be informed", "freedom of the press", "rules of ethics": journalists have not stinted on fancy talk in their justification of the broadcast on TF1 - and a few other channels - of excerpts of the exchange between Mohamed Merah and the police who surrounded his apartment in Toulouse. Without sermonizing - after all, any news source would have done the same thing if it had been in possession of these tapes - I must admit my profound irritation, to put it mildly, with regard to these Tartuffes who speak to us about morals when it is merely a matter of scoops and market shares. Journalists are drug dealers and the crack was good.

But I am not really shocked. The information-producing machines of the media don't trouble themselves. What do professional secrecy and grief of the families matter compared to this race for an audience? Nothing. Reports of police interrogations are published the same day in our newspaper columns. Lawyers, magistrates, and journalists collaborate in this petty business so that each may greatly profit. The much-lauded investigative journalism is often nothing more that a journalism of fences, if not informers.

Broadcasting Merah's conversations has at least one advantage: it destroys the "analyses" that proliferated in the press at the time of the killings and that painted a picture of the man as being a poor lost kid from the ghetto, with no family ties, a sort of victim of a society that didn't listen to him, or understand him, or set him on the right path.

Merah's cynicism, his coldness, his arrogance, his hatred of France, his hatred of Jews, this "ruse" that he boasts about: perhaps now at last the most obtuse and the most unaware will open their eyes to what they have been refusing to see - this hatred of the West and of Jews that inhabits a part of the Muslim youth of our suburbs. A blindness that perhaps explains how, though known to the intelligence services, Merah was able to slip through the net.

Below, Merah ("Death? I love it")