Tuesday, November 02, 2004

"France’s propaganda machine is working to undermine U.S. interests"

Kenneth R. Timmerman:


Every American who still has illusions that a Kerry administration would succeed in convincing "Old Europe" to help us in Iraq should spend a few days reading and listening to the French media as they report on the U.S. elections.

The French, of course, believe that they will elect the next U.S. president. (In fact, they believe they already have.) The center-right daily Le Figaro published the results of a poll it commissioned on Friday, Oct. 29, showing that 71 percent of Frenchmen support Senator Kerry while 82 percent believe President Bush has made the world a more dangerous place.

Daniel Mermet of French state-run radio is just one of many well-known French journalists who have abandoned all pretense of reporting the elections. Instead, he and others of his ilk present blatant campaign commercials that would make even Mike McCurry and George Stephanopoulos blush.

"French politicians running for president in 2007 can take heart from the U.S. elections," Mermet began a recent screed from West Virginia. "The U.S. election shows you can run on a catastrophic record — that's the case for Bush — and succeed completely. It shows you can be in the pay of the big oil companies, you can pass a totally unfair tax cut, you can devastate the poor, gut social security, ravage the health care system and throw 600,000 people out of work, but that's ok."

I can add a personal experience to the mix. State-run France-3 television recently invited me to participate in a panel discussion on the U.S. elections. While I had few expectations of fairness, the extent of the lies and distortions I encountered was astonishing even by French standards. …

Read about the 52-minute pseudo-documentary and
the sophisticated and agreeable French couple
whose views were "all so reasonable,
all so normal and matter of fact"

(Thanks to Gregory Schreiber)

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