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646Un thème largement évoqué à propos de l’arrestation de DSK, c’est l’attitude des médias français vis-à-vis des mœurs, et des affaires de mœurs courantes ou extravagantes, des élites politiques françaises. Divers articles, essentiellement anglo-saxons, abordent cette situation d’un œil critique, comme John Lichfield, de The Independent ce 17 mai 2011. (On pourrait aussi consulter l’article de Angelique Chrisafis, pour le Guardian, ce 17 mai 2010.)
Lichfield cite beaucoup l’article du Français Christophe Deloire, directeur du Centre de formation des journalistes et auteur de Sexus politicus (Albin Michel, 2006), ce 16 mai 2011, dans Le Monde. Deloire évoque dans son article, ses tentatives assez infructueuses de faire connaître ce problème...
Lichter donne une version classique, réaffirmée avec l’affaire DSK-Sofitel, de l’habituelle critique anglo-saxon de la conduite de la presse française sur cette question. Il met néanmoins en évidence certaines questions qui méritent d’être posées.
«Dominique Strauss-Kahn could have been President of France. It is probably true to say that, 12 months from now, he would have been President. Yesterday he appeared in a New York courtroom accused of “attempted rape” and “sexual assault”. He dismisses the allegations, but his presidential ambitions – never openly declared – are clearly over. Whatever the truth, it is impossible to imagine that this miserable affair could be settled before the deadline for “DSK” to enter the French Socialist primary in late June.
»It is hazardous to comment on any “he said, she-said” sexual allegation. It is a fact, however, that the Parisian media-political village has known, and sniggered, for years at DSK's reputation. He was, it was said, not just a man who had frequent sexual affairs. That was common enough in French politics and resolutely not something that the French media bothered with. The unpublished reports about DSK went further. He was, it was said, a man who could not safely be left alone with a young woman.
»Is that not a relevant piece of information about a politician – however brilliant, however charismatic – who has topped the presidential opinion polls for months? And yet, with one or two brief, noble exceptions, the French media threw a veil over the darker side of DSK's relations with women until Saturday evening, when he was arrested in New York and charged with the attempted rape of a chambermaid in a Manhattan hotel. […]
»Is DSK a victim of a plot or a lie? Maybe. But he may also be a victim of his own arrogance and sense of immunity. A sense of untouchability on “affaires de mœurs” (sexual questions) is shared by many French politicians. Not all have a reputation for forcing their attentions on young women.
»Mr Strauss-Kahn, it emerged yesterday, has been the subject of similar allegations in France, which have never been made public. Tristane Banon, 31, a French journalist and writer, said that she would take belated legal action against Mr Strauss-Kahn for what she described as a sexual attack on her in 2002… […]
»In the case of DSK – and the evidence of his predatory attitude towards women – the French media, Mr Deloire suggested, had a duty to write about such things. Privacy should be trumped, he said, by what George Orwell called “common decency”: the simple morality and honesty that rules the lives of most ordinary people.
»Mr Deloire is also the director of the French media training school, the Centre de Formation des Journalistes (CFJ). When he wrote about DSK's attitude to women in his book, he met silence or hostility on the part of the mainstream French media. By their failure to address these issues – whatever truth finally emerges about the DSK affair – the French media and politicians were, he said yesterday, widening the gulf between “people” and the “system”. Small wonder that French politics was being hijacked by populists of the far right and far left.
»Mr Deloire is right. The French media and French justice systems have an extravagant definition of the extents of “privacy” for public figures. Consensual extramarital affairs are one thing. Sexual harassment, bordering on assault is another.
»The British media may be guilty of being too prurient about the private activities of politicians; the French media is too supine.»
dedfensa.org
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