The end could be near for Libération, the newspaper founded by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and members of the extreme political left.
After years of falling readership and advertising, the paper’s largest shareholder, Edouard de Rothschild, has stopped paying operating costs and, according to Pierre Haski, deputy editor of the newspaper, salaries have been frozen for October. “On Sept. 28, we hit the wall,” Mr. Haski said. “This seems too sad, but it is the reality.”
How terrible! Quick, get Jean Q. Taxpayer to bail it out!!
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
7 comments:
Bon debarras. Libe evolved from a fun iconoclastic paper in the early 80s to angry liberal trash (really the French equivalent) in the mid-90s. Imagine the brainchild or rush & ann only upsided down.
Even a pinko-leftie-stalo-communist-baby-killer-apologist-terrorist-wannabe like me found it pathetic.
IHT has the same article with a funnier start. How come the Old Grey Lady chickened out?
Yet it was sobriety itself compared to Kossia, Huntingtonia, and Chomskiana, Pepe's three favorite islets of the "mind". Did Liberation become too bourgois for the Le Pewian taste? Or did it simply prove "incompetent" and Pepe is the sort of vacquero that likes to leave his weak horses rotting by the path?
AA: You're right -- having Pepe pissing on Libé raises questions in my mind, too. That talk of "angry liberal trash" -- in Euro-parlance, of course, liberal is the opposite of what it means here (usually, "liberal" there is associated with the dreaded Anglo-Saxons). And yes, I must say I've read perhaps 3 or 4 articles in Liberation over the past decade that madde some sense, and had some nuance -- rather unusual.
So perhaps, after all, it's not reason to rejoice too much? I dunno, on balance I'd still go with Pepe on this one, and say, bon debarras. The asheap of history is waiting for more commies to plunge in there.
If memory serves, Pepe also thinks NouvelObs is a rag. So he agrees with reason when it comes to those papers. Why no gag reflex at the NYT?
The Nel Obs is close to Libe in that respect.
If there is one thing to respect in american journalism is that the gold standard is the separation of news from editorial. Not all do it, but we all understand that that is the way to report. No such thing in France - the line is very blurred and there is no expectation that it shouldn't. Compared to Le Monde & Figaro, NYT /Post are paragons of objectivity.
That's absolutely true. I'm always shocked when going back to Europe (not just to France) at how editorializing is not at all compartimentalized from news reporting. They must mis that chapter in the Journalism 101 textbook, I guess.
I thought for a long time that that's simply a cultural difference between the "Anglo-Saxons" (in the French meaning of the word) and the rest of Europe (and probably the World). But the recent drift of the BBC in the direction of not mere editorializing, but out-and-out propagandizing in its "reporting" (as in that recent article about Kurdistan), makes me strongly doubt that long-held belief. Are we in the US the last of the Mohicans in that respect?
Post a Comment