In France, media worry about press freedom

Numerous journalists have been charged with revealing state secrets and questioned by France's intelligence services. French media fear that press freedom is at risk under President Emmanuel Macron.

About a hundred people are sitting in a cafe in central Paris watching a video that shows how journalists at Disclose, a new online media outlet, identified French tanks in local video footage of the war in Yemen. One of the authors, investigative journalist Mathias Destal, is explaining why he and his team believe the government-owned weapons company Nexter provided weapons and tanks to Saudi Arabia, which were then used against civilians in Yemen — and that the government knew about this.

The report is not only shocking to the audience. It's also triggered a sharp reaction by the French government, which has pressed charges against the journalist for revealing state secrets; the report is based on classified documents. Destal and two other journalists at Disclose have been questioned by the secret services.

Read more: France's 'yellow vests' and the Russian trolls who encourage them

"We were received by two female officers who took us four floors below ground level into an interrogation room — it was quite intimidating," he explained.

The interrogators had numerous questions about Disclose's editorial policy, how it is financed and whether Destal understood what the term "state secret" means.

"One of my colleagues was even asked about some of his Twitter and Facebook posts that are unrelated to this report," he said.

Only one question had to do with the journalists' sources, which has made Destal think it was above all an attempt to frighten him.

"As a journalist, you normally get sued for libel in front of a special court. But in this case, the investigators don't seem to question the accuracy of what we wrote. And the inquiry is not led by independent judges but by the public prosecutor who is, at least formally, under the authority of the Justice Ministry," he said.

Destal could go to prison for five years and have to pay a fine of up to €75,000 ($85,400).

And Disclose is not the only media being targeted by the government. The secret services have questioned eight journalists from various publications as well as the managing director of Le Monde newspaperover the past three months about the Yemen arms story and the so-called Benalla affair, concerning Alexandre Benalla, a former top presidential aide who allegedly overstepped his authority.

'An attack on investigative journalism'

Pauline Ades-Mevel, a spokeswoman at Paris-based NGO Reporters Without Borders, says the events add up to an attack on investigative journalism. "The fact that the secret services are questioning journalists is a problem, but it becomes a huge problem when a lot of journalists are being questioned in such a short time," she said.

Read more: Global press freedom under threat, says Reporters Without Borders

She explained that the court cases were costing the journalists time and resources, which they then couldn't devote to further investigations. She added that this was also likely to scare off potential sources and have a chilling effect on other investigative journalists: "They'll think twice before investigating certain stories."

What's more, the charges come in a wider context, explains Jean-Marie Charon, a media specialist and researcher at Paris-based university EHESS. He thinks France is going backwards regarding press freedom.

"There have been quite a few laws over the past few years that strengthen the arsenal in the fight against terrorism and also protect trade secrets. These laws increasingly restrict how journalists can work," he said.

'Areas journalists shouldn't cover'

He added that journalists had also been targeted during the recent "yellow vest" protests, demonstrations that were first triggered by a new fuel tax and then turned into a revolt against the political elite.

"The police beat journalists or took away or damaged their material in 105 cases. All this — the charges, the new laws and the crackdown on journalists — sends the message that there are areas that journalists just shouldn't cover," Charon said.

Sociologist Jean-Marie Charon sees France going backward on press freedom

Past French governments have often had rocky relationships with the media. Charon thinks Emmanuel Macron is worse than some of his predecessors.

"Macron seems to believe the press needs to be kept in check. At various points, he has come out a bit like a know-it-all, explaining to journalists how to do their jobs and saying that the media are reporting on many things but not the important ones," he said.

Defining a state secret

But Raphael Gauvain, a member of parliament with Macron's party, denies that journalists are being targeted excessively.

"We are not at all trying to muzzle the press. It's completely normal to conduct investigations when state secrets have been revealed. The secret services have carried out the questioning, yes, but they are responding to the prosecutor and not to the justice minister," he said.

"We should trust in our functioning democracy and justice system. The latter will eventually decide what takes priority — our state secrets or freedom of the press," he underlined.

Media researcher Charon, however, says the government is expanding the definition of state secrets: "I can understand that the term is used to protect the lives of soldiers, for example in Mali. But here, it would only help the government save face. That's not how it should be."

Journalist Destal, meanwhile, is adamant that he will continue his investigative work — now even more so than before.

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/in-france-media-worry-about-press-freedom/a-49350052

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truth?

Gus: Thierry Meyssan makes an astonishing discovery... I am a bit sarcastic here. This is what he tells us:

"We lie to ourselves.

....

Today the vulgum pecus, [us] the ignorant crowd, takes bladders for lanterns and spreads fake news..."

Gus: Thierry, may I say that this is not news nor new. What is possibly new, is that the number of "mensonges" (lies) have increased with the number of people living on this planet. For many years the main lies were religious lies to make people submit to authority. The authority was a guy (or a girl) in power who often claimed divine rights to rule. this was A BIG MENSONGE, LÜGE, MENTIRA... Often, these lies came about because we did not know the truth. And we still don't. We fabricate interpretations of what we see to make some sense of what we do. What we don't see, we have to imagine and reconstruct from the bits and pieces of a broken narrative where events have become deliberately hidden by others, especially our leaders. WE DON'T HAVE TO. We could simply believe anything or nothing under the sun and still be happy. But for some of us, like you and me, we have been lied to so often, that we want to know better. This is where sciences come in. But here, we still need to make distinction between "fake sciences" like economics and politics — which are in reality art forms — and sciences that explain the planet, its evolution and the universe to a relative point in time. 

That we lie to ourselves is a given. It has been part of the success of homo sapiens, even in its vulgum pecus form... This has made us build cathedrals, mosques, castles and capitalism — and news, which has become the opium of the volkes. Some people start spreading fake news to combat the torpor, while others to combat the fake news. WE NEED TO REMAIN VIGILANT. 

FREE ASSANGE. (see: numerous falsehoods have been spread about assange… )

GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC.

RELIGIONS ARE NOT DEMOCRATIC.

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Propaganda and Post-Truth

by Thierry Meyssan

For 18 years, we have been debating the strange evolution of the media, which seems to place less and less value on facts. We attribute this phenomenon to their democratization through social networks. It would be because from now on any person can become a journalist, that the quality of information would have collapsed. The right to speak should therefore be reserved for the elites. 

What if it’s exactly the opposite? If the censorship we are considering was not the answer to the phenomenon, but its continuity?

Sisyphus painfully raises his rock to the top of the mountain of his ambitions, the stone then rolls inexorably down the other side to the underworld. Then he starts this absurd work again.

Propaganda

In political systems where Power needs the participation of the People, the purpose of propaganda is to get as many people as possible to adhere to a particular ideology and to mobilize them to apply it.

The methods used to convince are the same whether one is acting in good or bad faith. However, in the 20th century, the use of lies and repetition, the elimination of different points of view, and recruitment into mass organizations were first theorized by British MP Charles Masterman, US journalist George Creel and especially German minister Joseph Goebbels with the devastating consequences that we know [1]. This is why, at the end of the two World Wars, the United Nations General Assembly adopted three resolutions condemning the use of deliberate lies in the media to provoke war and enjoining Member States to ensure the free flow of ideas, the only prevention of intoxication [2].

While propaganda techniques have been perfected over the past 75 years and are systematically used in all international conflicts, they are gradually giving way to new techniques of influence in countries at peace: it is no longer a question of making the public adhere to an ideology and act in the service of power, but on the contrary of dissuading it from intervening, paralysing it.

This strategy corresponds to a so-called "democratic" organization of society where the public has the capacity to sanction Power, which was rarely the case before.

It has spread over the past 18 years with the "War on Terror". Many intellectuals have stressed the absurdity of this expression: terrorism is not an enemy, it is a military technique. However, we cannot wage war on war. Even if we did not understand it at the time, the invention of this paradoxical expression was intended to institute the era of post-truth.

Post-truth

Let us take the example of the recent execution of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. We all know that a helicopter squad cannot fly low across northern Syria without being seen by the population or spotted by Russian air defence systems. The narrative that is told to us is clearly impossible. However, far from questioning what we consider propaganda, we are discussing whether the Caliph, cornered by the US Special Forces, blew himself up with two or three children.

At other times, we would have agreed that an essential element of this story being impossible, we cannot take seriously the other elements that are before us, starting with the death of the Caliph. Now we think otherwise. We accept that this factual element has been falsified, a priori for reasons of national security, and we consider the rest of the narrative as authentic. In the long run, we will forget our concern with this or other elements and publish encyclopedias that will tell this beautiful story with its most unlikely elements.

In other words, we instinctively understand that this narrative does not tell facts, but conveys a message. We are therefore not positioning ourselves in the face of the facts, but in the face of the message as we have understood it: as Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was executed; Power remains in the United States of America.

To move our consciousness from facts to message, speech writers have an obligation to deliver an inconsistent narrative. It is not an unfortunate mistake on their part that is repeated, but a technical requirement of their work.

In classical propaganda, the aim was to tell coherent stories, if necessary by concealing certain facts or falsifying them. Not anymore. Because we no longer try to convince with beautiful stories, if necessary by getting comfortable with reality. But we are addressing an intermediate state of consciousness through which we convey messages. We are aware that this helicopter affair is impossible, but we can reason by eliminating it from our field of consciousness. A part of our intellect has been inhibited.

We lie to ourselves.*

We can find a very large number of examples of the use of this packaging technique in recent years. All those I could mention will make most of my readers nervous because each example requires us to recognize that we have been fooled with our own complicity. We hate to have our mistakes pointed out to us.

A small example anyway. It is ancient, but fundamental. It still plays a vital role today. During the attacks of September 11, airlines immediately published complete boarding lists of passengers and personnel who had died. Two days later, the FBI Director presented his account of the 19 hijackers who, in his opinion, had carried out the attacks. However, none of them, according to the airlines’ first-hand accounts, had boarded the four aircraft. His version is therefore impossible. Eighteen years later, however, we continue to discuss the personalities of these individuals.

Antidote

For the past 18 years, we have been told that by offering everyone the ability to express themselves on a blog or social networks, technological progress has devalued public speech. Anyone can say anything. In the past, only politicians and professional journalists had the opportunity to express themselves. They ensured the quality of their interventions and writings. Today the vulgum pecus, the ignorant crowd, takes bladders for lanterns and spreads fake news.

However, it is exactly the opposite. Leading politicians, starting with President George Bush Jr. and Prime Minister Tony Blair, have assumed inconsistent speeches to inhibit the reactions of the public in general and their constituents in particular. This technique substitutes absurdity for truth as others substituted lies. It has destroyed the functioning of the democratic systems that ordinary people are trying to restore with their means.

CRT televisions display 625-line images. It suffices that one of them be blurred for us to perceive so it alone in the image. On the same principle, it is enough to hear a single different point of view for the lies of omnipresent propaganda to be obvious. That is why propaganda, when it lies, requires relentless censorship. But if the lie introduces an inconsistency into the discourse so that this inconsistency becomes voluntarily obvious, alternative points of view should no longer be censored. On the contrary, we must let them express themselves and highlight them by publicly denouncing some of them as fake news.

The antidote to post-truth is not the verification of facts, this has always been the basis of the work of journalists and historians, it is the restoration of logic. This is why a new form of censorship is needed today. Most Facebook users have been logged out at one time or another. In countless cases, users are unable to understand why they have been censored. They search in vain for which prohibited word would have been detected by a computer, or which uncivil position would have been prohibited by a supervisor. In reality, what they are often accused of and arbitrarily sanctioned for is restoring logic to their reasoning.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 

Roger Lagassé

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article208229.html

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FREE ASSANGE.

GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC.

RELIGIONS ARE NOT DEMOCRATIC.

See:

... and many more little things that weigh in our little brains....

The attorney general’s department admonished Channel Nine for broadcasting a story about the One Nation candidate Steve Dickson misbehaving in a strip club because it may have breached foreign influence laws, Nine’s chief executive, Hugh Marks, has told the press freedom inquiry.

Marks said the personal letter he received in May had a “chilling effect” and was a perfect example of an authoritarian culture aimed at gagging the media.

The One Nation Senate candidate was forced to resign in April after A Current Affair aired footage of him groping dancers and making disparaging comments about a woman in a Washington DC strip club.

After the ACA story was broadcast Marks received a letter from an assistant secretary in the attorney general’s department scolding the network for not paying close attention to the new foreign influence transparency scheme, even while admitting Nine had not broken any laws.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/13/government-chilling-letter...

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Asked about the shocking remarks by Gérald Darmanin on populist France, the government spokesperson [Sibeth Ndiaye] said: "This government is like our country, with varied backgrounds, not just 40-year-old white-technos" Skidding on thin ice?... Sibeth Ndiaye has once again made the headlines. And this time, it was with an inverted "racist" comment, close to Indigenism.

Asked on December 20 on RTL about the utturances of Gérald Darmanin who, the day before, had advised Emmanuel Macron to surround himself with more people from "populist France", that, according to him, is made of "people who drink beer and eat with their fingers," the government spokeswoman laughed at this controversial statement by the French Minister of Action and Public Accounts [Gérald Darmanin]. First, she seemed to place into perspective the words of her colleague in the government, saying that "in [her] African culture, you eat with your fingers, you don't eat with forks and spoons".

A remark that should shock, since, beyond the cliché and the general African/French reciprocity, the present republican culture — which is the link between the French people — seems to be relegated to limbo.

Find out more about RT France: https://francais.rt.com/france/69379-techno-blancs-apres-couac-gerald-da...

Translation by Jules Letambour.

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See also:

Retirement protest: on strike, the ballerinas of the Paris Opera play "Le Lac des Cygnes" [Swan Lake] on the forecourt of the Paris Opera House...

Find out more about RT France: https://francais.rt.com/france/69476-retraites-greve-danseuses-opera-par...

The subjects on the “programmes” having literally crushed the real information dedicated to strikes in transport, it is not surprising to see journalists running to find the most anecdotal testimonies able to provide them, again and again, with stories of distressed users who will break your heart. You have to satisfy the media appetite for sensational storytelling and "telegenic" blows ... as much as the media operators' obsession with covering the negative consequences of strikes on air.

And if many journalists have crisscrossed the station platforms or the Paris ring road, others have made their "operations" live ... from Twitter. Guaranteeing a considerable "time saving" and a derisory "manufacturing cost", this practice meets the expectations of a low-cost, mass-produced journalistic production, particularly appreciated by the internet windows of the main media. A practice which could give a smile if it did not reflect, in reality, the dilapidated state of the journalistic trade, and which questions as for the loss of professional sense for "performers", playing, for some in spite of themselves, the game of this "journalism 2.0".

Read more:

https://www.les-crises.fr/bonjour-je-suis-journaliste-et-je-cherche-des-...

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