No Bad News, We’re French   

In America, the media contend with advertiser influence. In France, it's the government. And when push came to shove earlier this year, Agence France-Presse, the world's third-largest news agency, blinked.

In a showdown most Americans would find inconceivable, French Prime Minister Alain Juppé confronted the chairman of AFP January 16 with complaints about the agency's coverage of two sensitive news events last year: the massive strikes that nearly shut down France (touched off by Juppé's vow to cut state workers' pensions and retirement benefits), and revelations that while deputy mayor of Paris, Juppé arranged to cut the rent on a city-owned luxury apartment he obtained for his son. Within weeks of the unflattering reports, AFP Chairman Lionel Fleury was out and a new official more to Juppé's liking was in.

AFP employs about 1,100 journalists worldwide and has revenues of about $24 million. The agency, intent on global expansion, has been worried that its close association with the French government would taint its credibility in the international market. Those worries recently became a reality, leaving the AFP with a seriously compromised reputation and calling attention to the agency's reliance on the government for 46 percent of its subscription sales as well as other subsidies.

Clearly Juppé would have preferred pro-government coverage of the strikes and no coverage at all of the rent scandal--and in the latter case that's almost what he got. A scrappy weekly newspaper called Le Canard Enchaîné (The Chained Duck) broke the rent-scandal story last summer. It was also Le Canard Enchaîné that broke the story of Juppé's dressing-down of Fleury.

The French are less enchanted by investigative reporting than Americans. Government-press cooperation is also more explicit in France than in America. The government provides everything from income tax deductions for reporters to subsidies of the cost of newsprint. These subsidies, according to Paris-based investigative reporter Mark Hunter, enable certain newspapers to survive, and in an average year constitute nearly one-fifth of the press' advertising revenues.

Fleury, first elected AFP chairman in 1993, had vowed to lessen AFP dependence on the government. But his tenure didn't last long enough to test his resolve. At a meeting of the agency's board of directors January 24, Fleury failed to get the votes necessary to win a second three-year term. Blocking his way were five government representatives on AFP's board.

On February 2 Juppé told reporters he hadn't proposed or supported any specific candidate for the chairman's job. However, he added ominously, "that said, the government guarantees about half of AFP's budget. It is thus normal for it to be worried about its development, its international influence, its modernization and its internal harmony."

Under the same 1957 law that established AFP's independence, board members are barred from running for chairman. But that didn't stop board member Jean Miot, former editorial board director of the conservative, pro-administration newspaper Le Figaro, from dropping off the board and being elected chairman a few days later.

As reports of the confrontation unfolded, the Confederation of French Workers charged that the agency's independence had been bargained away and its image "made ridiculous." The Socialist Party, which lost control of the government in 1993, said efforts to influence AFP's chairman selection indicated a misunderstanding of "the role of a news agency, which is not an agency of the state but a business enterprise working on a matter of great importance and subject to ferocious international competition."

But response from the French media was muted. Only after Miot's election did the left-leaning daily Libération jump in, observing, "everything today indicates that the agency suffers from a total contradiction between the objectives of the law enacted nearly 40 years ago to guarantee its independence and the ensuing metamorphosis."

At around the same time AFP's new chair Miot was quoted as saying that AFP's future independence would rest on two factors--financial equilibrium and development. How would government subsidies--along with government control of five board seats--fit into this picture? On this issue Miot offered no comment.