French Privacy & the Media

by Samantha Goodman

The French legal structure regarding privacy is traced back to the Napoleonic Code, all citizens, from peasant to president, have the right to paparazzi free private lives.

French Privacy Law

In "The Public and Private in Contemporary French Politics,"

About the author: Raymond Kuhn is a professor of political communication and contemporary French politics at the Queen Mary University of London. His focus is on the politics of the Fifth Republic, with special emphasis on the executive, political leadership, elections, political communication and the mediation of the interface between the public and the private.

Kuhn’s article looks at “the normative confusion surrounding attempts to establish an agreed dividing line between the public and the private in both politicians’ mediated communication and journalists’ political coverage” (185). This means that he is seeking to examine the blurred lines between the public and private lives of politicians and how this plays a role in their relationships with the media and their constituents. He looks at four areas of contention: (1) money; (2) health; (3) sex; and (4) family values.

Almost every French president has been part of a scandal in some capacity, most notably Mitterand for hidden health issues and an illegitimate daughter Mazarine Pingeot, below.

Sarkozy has made the press mainly for his personal relationships. He was married in 1982 and had two children, with the best man in his wedding later being a direct political opponent. He then officiated the wedding of Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz in 1988 and in 1989 she left her husband for Sarkozy and they continued an affair until they were married in 1996. They had one son. In 2007 Sarkozy divorced Cecilia and met Carla Bruni who he married in Feb 2008. Bruni is an Italian born-French singer and modeled who previously dated Jagger.

Read more on French politics and love in the news:

The Independent, 1994

The LA Times, 2007

BBC, 2008

Kuhn believes that to disentangle the public from the private, it is possible to assign news stories concerning politicians to different analytic categories. These can be broken down to public revelations, private revelations, public secrets and private secrets. These can be found in all areas of contention, as politicians work to create a positive image of themselves for the public. They work to keep certain aspects of their personal lives, such as health and money, private secrets, but also aim to highlight certain realms, such as family values, as important to their careers. In the case of women politicians such as Segolene Royal, sex is shown to be unimportant, but for some politicians, specifically males, sexual relationships tend to be hidden or unacknowledged in order to preserve a sense of trust within the society.

French police collected mug shots of all of the paparazzi present near Princess Diana’s crash in an effort to confiscate evidence and discern any breach of privacy

Kuhn writes, the trend on the part of politicians towards the mediatisation of their private liveshas been amplified by the routinisation of the internet as a medium of political communication, and in particular by the spread of the ‘blog’ phenomenon. The blog allows a politician to bypass the traditional intermediary filters and gatekeepers of the mainstream news media.

French political blog “No Parasan!”

In terms of process, the production of blog content is fully under the control of the politician as source and so can be put into the public sphere unmediated. With regard to content, the nature of the blog allows for a mix of public and private information to be disseminated: politicians may not only give their views on public events, but can also control the release of more personalised information, including elements of their private lives if they so choose.

Kuhn concludes that what does exist of political and celebrity press is limited in France because of privacy laws, limited French magazines on the topic and lack of interest by the public. The French media covers mainly Americans in this area.

Les Presidents!

CHARLES DE GUALLE

“Military HERO!”

Born 1890, Lille of Northern France

Elected 1959-1969

Career highlights:

Founded the Free French Forces in World War II, an underground military force during the Nazi occupation, then serving as a provisional president after the war

His support of the May 1958 Algerian crisis got him elected

Wrote a new constitution freeing Algeria and founding the French Fifth Republic

Oui, c'est vrai: He was president during May 68 and said

"La réforme oui, la chienlit non", "Reform yes, masquerade no," consequently resigning in 1969.

GEORGES POMPIDOU

“C’est La Nouvelle France”

Born Montbounif, central France, 1911

Elected 1969-1974 (died in office)

Career highlights:

Best known as De Gualle’s Prime Minister, longest serving Prime Minister

Became president as a consequence of De Gualle’s resignation

Supported the May 1968 efforts

Supported the UK as a European Union member

Responsible for “modern” Paris, such as the Beaubourg Museum (now Centre Pompidou), Les Halles and the Montparnasse Tower

Oui, c'est vrai: Appears to have been scandal free (or very good at privacy, being that he passed the Article 9 privacy law in 1970)

VALERY GISCARD D'ESTAING

"Descendent of the King"

Born 1926 in Koblenz, Germany

His mother was a great great great illegitimate granddaughter of King Louis XV and his mistress.

Elected 1974-1981

Career highlights:

Best known for his liberal support of divorce and abortion and supporting the TGV.

He initiated the Group Six, now the G-20.

Oui, c'est vrai: He was not reelected and following his presidency was criticized for purchasing an estate his family lost when beheaded during the revolution.

FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND

“The Sole Socialist”

Born 1916, Angoulême Southwestern France

Elected 1982-1995

Career Highlights:

Longest running and oldest president

German Prisoner of War in WWII

Only Socialist president of France

Restructured the parliament to be Socialist

Abolished the death penalty

Liberalized the media by first creating the CSA, then allowing private broadcast (Canal +) and legalizing pirate radio

Secured the Chunnel and the creation of La Defense

Oui, c'est vrai: When elected he was diagnosed with cancer but he kept his cancer out of the media by publishing false health reports. In 1993, Liberation revealed the Mitterrand had his headquarters under wiretap to prevent leaks of information,

including his affair and illegitimate daughter

JACQUES CHIRAC

“The Parisian Giuliani”

Born 1932, Paris

Elected 1995-2007

Career highlights:

First a liberal then a right wing

Began as a Socialist working for L’Humanite

Negotiated the May 1968 truce

Mayor of Paris from 1977-95

He advocated the values of the wealthy with lower taxes, lower crime, more privatization of the commerce

Oui, c'est vrai: First served as prime minister in 1974 and negotiated a deal with Irag in 1975, a trade of nuclear testing equipment for oil privileges

NICOLAS SARKOZY

“Carla Bruni’s Husband”

Born 1955

Elected 2007-

Career highlights:

Trained under Chirac

Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France’s wealthiest neighborhood from 1982-2003

Emphasizes improved work ethic

Emphasizes improved foreign relations, mainly the UK and USA

Close relationship with Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH

Oui, c'est vrai: Three marriages and numerous press scandals and press lawsuits, married to model and singer Bruni

Media & Politics

by Samantha Goodman

19th century political cartoons by Daumier combined politics and entertainment, evident today in UK's Private Eye.

Hallin and Mancini “identified a number of political system variables that [they] believe are relevant to the comparative analysis of media systems” (63). They hypothesize that these variables can be summarized in terms of five main dimensions: (1) the relation of state and society, with particular distinctions made between liberal and welfare-state democracies; (2) distinctions between majoritarian patterns of government and consensus patterns of government; (3) distinctions between corporatism (or organized pluralism) and liberal pluralism as related to marjoritarian and consensus patterns of governing; (4) the development of “rational-legal authority”; and (5) the differences between moderate pluralism and polarized pluralism.

They key question that the authors are trying to answer, or more accurately address, is how “principal characteristics of political systems… can influence the structure of media institutions” (46). The five dimensions previously mentioned are examined, somewhat briefly, through the lenses of the three media system models that are continually referenced throughout the rest of the book: The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model, the North/Central European Model, and the North Atlantic or Liberal Model.

The most important information derived from this chapter is the definitions provided in each of the five dimensions to help the reader further understand the role that government plays in shaping media institutions, and that that role is not the same throughout each model of systems, nor is it even quite the same in each country within the three respective models. This chapter acts as a guide to the political context of media systems, providing on overview of how strongly governments and specifically political parties play a role in directing the media, specifically newspapers and television, in terms of the content and their party ties and opinions. This varies from country to country depending on the degree of deregulation that has taken place and the degree of professionalism among journalists.

The authors point out that there are many differences between US and European Political Press, mainly party campaigning over candidate campaigning

Chapter 4, on a slightly similar note, provides a segue from the groundwork provided in chapter 3 to an introduction into how politics will play roles in each of the specific models. This chapter reads more like an introduction to a book than anything else: the authors introduce (again) the three models and note that the models will serve as a form of organizing their “empirical discussion of the media systems of particular countries, and second, by posing the question whether the patterns observed here can be understood in terms of differentiation theory” (66). As we have seen in previous readings in the textbook, Hallin and Mancini go into extreme detail of the media systems and political involvement in each; therefore, the remainder of this chapter discusses the terms of differentiation theory.

The authors cite definitions of differentiation by Durkheim, Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann as their main comparative sources of differentiation and how it plays a role in politics and media. According to Durkheim, “modern societies become increasingly complex as functions are divided among social bodies that speicialize in particular functions” (76-77). This idea that “society requires functional differentiation of social roles and institutions” (77) ties into the Parsons’ evolutionist theory of differentiation, which he defines as “the division of a unit or structure of a social system into two or more units or structures that differ in their characteristics and functional significance for the system” (77). This second idea of differentiation is seen more from an evolutionary standpoint, and is not as much of a focus for the authors as Luhmann’s theory who says that “the difference between social knowledge produced by a specialized media system and that produced by ‘sages, priests, the nobility, the city, by region or by politically and ethnically distinguished ways of life… is so stark that once can speak neither of decline nor of progress’ (2000:85)” (77).

Differentiation is understanding the different sources of information and how those sources influence reliability. While some suggest we have increased in differentiation others propose that capitalism and the internet have resulted in de-differentiation, blending information from all sources.

This then leads Hallin and Mancini to the role of differentiation in mass media, saying that public opinion is organized by mass media systems, which draw attention to important problems, but that it is left to the governing bodies of a country to make decisions about those problems. This means that for this to function without problem the means of communication need to be autonomous from the political system for which they develop their agendas. Here, the idea of professionalism comes into play, varying within each of the geographical models, with the Liberal Model seen as the ideal form of professionalism and autonomy within journalism.

To conclude, the authors argue that differentiation theory “takes [them] a certain distance in understanding the broad differences in media systems, particularly in its emphasis on the historical fusion of media systems with the system of political parties and social groups based on class, religion, ethnicity and the life, and the different degrees to which systems have moved away from these relationships” (85).

Papathanassopoulos, ch 6: Politics in the Television Age.

Unlike Hallin and Mancini who focus on the role politics play in controlling media, Papathanassopoulos examines the relationship between television and politics. He places emphasis on four points of focus in the intertwining relationship between politics and television: (1) television and politics; (2) television and election campaigning; (3) television and politicians; and (4) television and politics in the era of modernization and digitalization. The author states from the beginning of the chapter that there is no clear answer to whether it has been television that changed how politicians relate to the media, or if has been politics that has changed television.

Important in considering the relationship of politics and television is that Americans are more comfortable with politicians as media figures, in an era of what the author calls videocracy.

American politics and media seem are contrasted by the European system although Charles de Gualle below saw television as an advantage in the 1960's.

In the first section on television and politics, Papthanassopoulos argues that the “growing indifference of the public towards politics should be attributed to the decline of politics in a new post-Cold War era rather than being considered as the outcome of television’s dominance” (125-126). He argues that political parties tailor their agendas to the needs of television, such as time limits during political debates and conferences. In the second section on television and election campaigning, “the importance of television has resulted in a change in both politicians’ style of political communication and in the way they contact their supporters” (138). The author states that politicians have had to turn their campaigns into popularity contests, often trying t out-do one another in the number of their celebrity supporters in an attempt to gain support from their constituents. Because most of their constituents gather their information on political candidates from what they watch on television, politicians must hire image consultants to play up their personal appeal to voters rather than emphasize their focus issues and proposed policies.

Society has also changed along with media. People are now more educated. This means while people used to depend on the party to make informed decisions, now citizens are more informed and making issue based decisions. The online website EU Profiler allows people to answer questions and determine party preferences.

Media may not always held a campaign. In the 1996 Italian race, media magnate Silvio Berlusconi was against a professor, Romano Prodi who tried to reach people in person and won. In the 1998 German elections the losing candidate Helmut Kuhl tried to use celebrity supporters such as Karl Lagerfeld to improve his campaign.

Victory for Romano Prodi in 1996

Some suggested that Helmut Kuhl's celebrity endorsements hurt his campaign

Papthanassopoulos states that, “European politicians have turned heavily to television for their public communication” (140). Viewers see a candidate on television and feel as if they know them on a personal level due to the fact that the messages political parties and specific politicians are trying to convey have been presented in “simple formulas,” which leads the electorate to vote based on personality rather than capabilities (140).

The final section argues that, “the rise of a ‘modernized’ relationship between the media and politics does not seem to be making a positive contribution to the health of democracy” (126). The author believes that there has been a shift from traditional forms of election campaigning in favor of more modern ways, especially in the television sector of media. He notes that many modern techniques have been borrowed from American political communication, such as the “journalistic use of public opinion polls and extreme simplification of the issues” (143-144).

Top, from left, right wing candidate Valery Giscard d'Estaing (L) and socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1974 and 1981. Bottom, from left: right wing hopeful Jacques Chirac and Francois Mitterrand in 1988, and socialist Lionel Jospin and Jacques Chirac in 1995. During the presidential campaign in 2002, Chirac refused to attend a televised debate with far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.