Le Figaro Walks Tightrope Under Wealthy Owner

In the International Herald Tribune, Doreen Carvajal explains how Le Figaro, under a wealthy new owner, is walking on a tightrope

The imposing headquarters of France's leading conservative daily, Le Figaro, rises from the wide sidewalks of Rue du Louvre like some great, battered ocean liner.
Its royal blue awnings are weather-beaten and fading, fat pigeons are roosting on its rooftop, and lately this venerable Parisian paper has been thrashed by an unrelenting wave of bad news.

One of its foreign correspondents is the captive of Iraqi insurgents, his giant, somber photograph part of a vigil outside City Hall here. The French trade press is picking over the state of Le Figaro's financial health with reports about internal memos warning that its tepid circulation has fallen in the past two months.

And inside Le Figaro, a divided newsroom seethes with "rumors and counter-rumors and attacks that go up and down," as one veteran journalist put it, since the takeover of the newspaper last spring by the French military industrialist Serge Dassault.

Le Figaro, which was started in 1826 as a gossip sheet for the arts, is actually engulfed in two debates that run together like ink and paper. One is an internal dispute about the paper's very soul, its voice, credibility and independence. The other is a broader discussion about the declining circulation of France's national newspapers: how to counter falling readership in a country where one out of six people read the national dailies, representing 17 percent of the population.

The debate about Le Figaro's independence has been intensifying since March, when the aeronautics giant Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault bought 82 percent of the shares of Socpresse for an estimated E1.5 billion, or $1.8 billion. …

Dassault is not the first company to master military hardware and then move into media. The conglomerate Lagardère, for example, presides over missiles as well as magazines like Paris Match and Elle. Together, Socpresse and Lagardère own more than 70 percent of the French press.

But Serge Dassault, 79, has quickly raised hackles in his short tenure as media mogul by adopting a more aggressive approach than his late contemporary Jean-Luc Lagardère, who "never took control directly of his publications and was extremely discreet," said Jean-Marie Charon, a sociologist and media specialist with the Center for the Study of Social Movements in Paris.

"Lagardère followed a tradition of bosses who avoided interfering," he said.

The business mix of weapons and words is nothing new, for that matter. General Electric, owner of the U.S. television network NBC, is a military contractor, as was NBC's former owner, RCA.

"But the difference with Mr. Dassault is that he is an interventionist and the major change is his naïve behavior," said Robert Ménard, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris.

Dassault, a former fighter pilot whose company turns out combat aircrafts like the Mirage and the Rafale, has a fondness for conservative politics and the style of the rumpled U.S. television detective Columbo. He raised anxieties with a series of articles that started appearing, or disappearing, from Le Figaro, according to a number of journalists there.

…A reference to a potential Rafale aircraft deal was excised from an article, according to a number of Le Figaro journalists. …

In an interview in 1997, Dassault [a longtime friend of President Jacques Chirac] spoke bluntly about his views on the French press and his desires for a media outlet.

"I've had enough of insults from a certain number of journalists because they are incompetents who don't know the real problems," he said. "So I want to be able to respond."

[Recently,] Dassault issued statements to the staff noting that journalists must serve the paper's readers. The problem, though, is that those readers are dwindling for some major national French dailies, which makes some journalists at Le Figaro uneasy. They have watched Le Monde suffer a decline of more than 3 percent in its total circulation since July 2003. This month, Le Monde announced a buyout plan that will result in the departures of more than 90 employees, 35 of them journalists, and more could come. …

It would seem that Dassault has won a seat for the Essonne in the Senate elections that took place on Sunday.