La Croix Fires Alain Hertoghe for Telling the Truth
The French newspapers are among the liveliest in the world in part because they do not pretend to be "objective." Regrettably, a fine journalist has lost his job at La Croix because he points out in a new book that in reporting on the recent war in Iraq, they weren't accurate either.
Alain Hertoghe is no neophyte; he covered the 1991 Gulf War and the US presidential campaign of 2000 and was assistant editor of La Croix's website during the fall of Saddam. The 44-year-old journalist published a book, La Guerre a Outrances (War of Outrages), this fall that detailed the shortcomings of the French media establishment in early 2003. In essence, he condemned his colleagues for being more patriotic than journalistic, hoping for an American defeat that would prove French policy right and allow France to stay in the club of great powers.
In the fashion of a social scientist, Mr. Hertoghe examined the contents of five major French papers, Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Croix, Liberation and Ouest France during the period from March 20 to April 9, 2003. He found 29 headlines slamming the Ba'athist dictatorship and 135 that were anti-Bush or anti-Blair. Worse, his book details that the French journalists “dreamed of an American defeat,” while their readers were carried away with the fantasy.
MSNBC.com quoted him as saying , “As soon as there were a couple of wounded, of dead, they [the French media] were talking about Vietnam, Stalingrad." It is one thing to have a perspective, and one would rather that the US media admitted theirs more. It is quite another thing to get the facts wrong. Iraq was never in danger of being another Stalingrad.
Mr. Hertoghe was fired from La Croix in mid-December, in part for damaging his newspaper's reputation. Frankly, he just pointed out the damage that the paper had done to itself. It would be comforting to think that his book might provide funds to cover the inconvenience of unemployment, but no major French paper has reviewed it. This is strange because the book has been well-received in Belgium, Mr. Hertoghe's native land. The facts speak for themselves.
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