Original too for all the far too many links ;-)
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/eric_zemmour_media_trump.php?
Anti-media rhetoric and violence as the ‘French Trump’ launches his campaign
By Jon Allsop, CJR https://www.cjr.org/author/jon-allsop
December 6, 2021
YESTERDAY, ERIC ZEMMOUR, a far-right candidate in France’s presidential
election, held his first official campaign rally in a suburb of Paris.
According to Le Monde
https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2021/12/06/election-presidentielle-2022-a-villepinte-eric-zemmour-s-imagine-en-sauveur-contre-les-medias-les-elites-et-les-juges_6104851_6059010.html
, around eleven thousand people showed up; addressing the crowd, Zemmour
thanked the “nearly fifteen thousand French people who braved the politically
correct, the threats of the far left, and the hatred of the media” to be there.
He wasn’t done bashing the press
https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2021/12/06/election-presidentielle-2022-a-villepinte-eric-zemmour-s-imagine-en-sauveur-contre-les-medias-les-elites-et-les-juges_6104851_6059010.html
: at one point, he described journalists as being part of a system that “wants
to steal democracy from you”; at another, he declared that “my adversaries want
me politically dead, journalists want me socially dead, and jihadists want me
dead, period.” He also repeated extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric and unveiled a
name for his political movement: Reconquête, or “Reconquest.” (The Spanish word
Reconquista recalls the historical period
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-french-presidential-hopeful-promises-reconquest-rally-2021-12-05/
when Christian armies fought to drive Muslim rulers out of modern-day Spain
and Portugal.) Zemmour pledged to work “tirelessly” to rid France of foreign
ideologies that have only survived thanks to “public money and militant
journalists.”
As I’ve written before in this newsletter
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists_politics_zemmour_kristof_johnson.php
, Eric Zemmour is a journalist, and a militant one at that: he began his
career as a political reporter before becoming a pundit, writing a column for
the conservative-leaning newspaper Le Figaro and appearing regularly on radio
and TV, most recently via a nightly show on the increasingly right-wing network
CNews, whose ratings he helped to juice. (Zemmour’s punditry has earned him two
convictions for hate speech against Black people, Muslims, and immigrants. One
of his convictions was recently overturned on appeal; a third case has yet to
be resolved.) He first started flirting with a presidential campaign a few
months ago in what initially struck many observers as publicity-seeking for a
new book
https://www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/article/2021/10/17/je-ne-l-aimais-deja-pas-en-journaliste-alors-en-politique-les-ex-collegues-d-eric-zemmour_6098737_4500055.html
; he tried to hold down his gig at CNews, but in September, he stepped back
after a regulator ruled that he was behaving like a candidate and should thus
be subject to the fairness rules that govern French election broadcasting
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/13/far-right-journalist-quits-french-tv-show-amid-election-rumours
. As he kept other journalists guessing about his intentions, he continued to
bash them. In October, he pledged to take back power from the media
https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2021/10/20/eric-zemmour-s-amuse-a-cibler-des-journalistes-avec-un-fusil_6099245_6059010.html
; a few days later, while visiting a trade show, he picked up a sniper rifle
and aimed it at a group of reporters, telling them to “get back.”
https://www.france24.com/en/video/20211021-french-politics-far-right-presidential-hopeful-points-gun-at-journalists
(He claimed this was a joke—“If you don’t know the difference between humor
and being serious then you’re an imbecile,” he told a reporter—but his
political opponents didn’t see the funny side.) Last Tuesday, Zemmour finally
made his campaign official in a video that used footage from various movies and
news channels without asking their permission first. (At least one network
threatened legal action
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20211201-french-media-slams-election-firebrand-zemmour-over-unauthorised-use-of-images-presidential-elections-2022
.)
The French media has responded to these and other provocations by granting
Zemmour a disproportionate amount of coverage as the presidential race has
started to heat up; according to one analysis, in September alone he scored
sixteen slots across prime-time TV and print front pages
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-media-eric-zemmour-donald-trump/ and
was mentioned by the media more than four thousand times
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/10/france-trump-eric-zemmour/620484/
. (The election will take place across two rounds in April; current polling
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/france/ suggests that Zemmour
won’t make the second round, but it’s still early and he isn’t far off.) He has
supplied reporters and commentators with an endless stream of controversies and
scandals to chew on: last week alone, news cameras snapped him giving a voter
the middle finger
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/giving-finger-french-presidential-hopeful-zemmour-sees-campaign-slump-2021-11-27/
, and Closer, a gossip magazine, reported that a senior campaign aide is
pregnant with Zemmour’s child. (Zemmour pledged to sue Closer
https://www.politico.eu/article/eric-zemmour-sarah-knafo-pregnant-closer-france-presidential-election-2021/
.) The voluminous coverage has led a number of French journalists to question
whether it’s all too much. “I can’t believe what I am hearing at our editorial
meetings,” a journalist at a left-wing newspaper in Paris told Politico
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-media-eric-zemmour-donald-trump/ . “We
do what the left does every time, pushing up the far right.” Over the weekend,
Julia Cagé, an economist and media expert, made the case that Zemmour has been
great for the business model of TV news, attracting viewers and generating
viral clips at a low financial cost
https://www.nouvelobs.com/election-presidentielle-2022/20211205.OBS51809/eric-zemmour-une-opportunite-economique-pour-les-chaines-d-information.html
. Staffers at some networks have reportedly raised concerns internally about
the volume of their Zemmour coverage
https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2021/11/07/election-presidentielle-2022-les-chaines-d-info-en-continu-face-a-la-parole-decomplexee_6101245_823448.html
.
If you think that this sounds a bit like the debate around coverage of Donald
Trump’s US presidential campaign in 2016, you aren’t the only one. Numerous
journalists and media-watchers, within France and without, have recently
attested to an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu: an adviser to the former French
president François Hollande told Politico that, by flooding the news cycle with
outrageous statements, Zemmour has “checkmated the media, just like Trump”;
Yasmeen Serhan, a writer at The Atlantic, warned that
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/10/france-trump-eric-zemmour/620484/
“by over-indexing on a single candidate, French journalists look doomed to
repeat the mistakes of their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.”
Just as the coverage of Zemmour has been compared to the coverage of Trump,
Zemmour has himself been compared to Trump the man, which has driven even more
coverage of his candidacy—not least in US media, which has recently generated
more than its fair share of “French Trump” profiles and thinkpieces. Zemmour
has courted such comparisons, sometimes
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/zemmour-france-presidency-trump.html
explicitly
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211103-france-s-trump-zemmour-has-studied-the-playbook
. And so the hellish content cycle churns on.
I generally find “Trump of [insert foreign country]” comparisons to be facile
and annoying, and there is, indeed, much that is different about Zemmour and
Trump, both substantively and aesthetically. (As one French sociologist pointed
out recently
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-media-eric-zemmour-donald-trump/ ,
Zemmour has worked to establish a veneer of intellectual credibility. His
campaign-launch video shows him reading from a stack of papers in front of a
library of musty-looking leather-bound books; it’s not hard to imagine Trump
calling this bad TV.) The US and French electoral systems differ, too, with the
latter’s two-round structure making anti-establishment upsets harder to pull
off; as the French media historian Alexis Lévrier recently noted
https://www.20minutes.fr/politique/3187963-20211202-presidentielle-2022-maitriser-agenda-mediatique-ere-reseaux-sociaux-difficile-estime-historien-alexis-levrier?xtor=RSS-176
, Zemmour’s ubiquitous media strategy will require ever-more inflammatory
rhetoric that will limit his ability to build the type of broad coalition the
French system demands. Still, whatever happens to Zemmour’s candidacy, he has
already succeeded at framing the media agenda around his extreme views. And
there is, ultimately, a similarity of media dynamics here. Zemmour seems to
have embraced Trump’s instinct that all publicity is good publicity, and it
seems to be working for him, too, at least in terms of courting more coverage
than his rivals. Observing Zemmour’s campaign launch last week was “like
watching a train wreck in slow motion,” Politico’s Clea Caulcutt wrote on
Friday https://www.politico.eu/article/france-zemmour-campaign-trump/ , but
“people are paying attention, even if it’s just to gawk.” (One Zemmour aide
told Caulcutt that even train wrecks can help build a narrative: “the hero
needs to overcome tribulations” to keep the media interested.)
Once the press has started to lavish attention on an extreme politician, it can
be hard to stop: as Serhan notes, “to dedicate too much time and space to
Zemmour would be to give him the clout that he no doubt craves, and signal to
audiences that he is more deserving of their attention than other potential
candidates,” but for the press to ignore him—especially having already
validated him as a big story—would “be to risk falling short of its
journalistic duty to report on and scrutinize a viable contender for the French
presidency,” not to mention the broader appeal of his odious ideas. Not that
scrutiny will necessarily dent Zemmour: as we saw with Trump, he can simply use
it to bolster his anti-establishment and press-bashing credentials. “What I
would say to the French is, as soon as you see that happening, where the very
criticism that you try to level against this candidate gets incorporated into
his pitch, you are in the danger zone and you’ve got to reconsider your
practices,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, told
Serhan. The attention horse may have bolted with Zemmour, as with Trump, though
in both cases, it’s not too late for media practices to change.
Not that change will keep French journalists out of the danger zone—they’re
already in one, including in a physical sense. Last month, journalists at
nearly forty French outlets called on politicians to act on rising anti-media
threats emanating from the far right
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2021/11/18/stop-aux-menaces-de-l-extreme-droite-visant-les-journalistes-l-appel-de-36-societes-de-journalistes_6102520_3232.html
, noting, among other warning signs, that Zemmour’s team blocked a regional
newspaper from covering a campaign meeting in retaliation for its coverage of a
prior event. According to journalists present
https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2021/12/05/meeting-d-eric-zemmour-violents-incidents-entre-des-participants-et-des-militants-antiracistes_6104827_6059010.html
(more than four hundred of whom were reportedly accredited for the event
https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2021/12/05/election-presidentielle-2022-eric-zemmour-veut-faire-une-demonstration-de-force-pour-son-meeting-a-villepinte_6104806_6059010.html
), attendees at yesterday’s Zemmour rally grew increasingly hostile toward the
media, booing journalists in general and verbally abusing specific reporters
https://www.europe1.fr/medias-tele/multiples-incidents-avec-la-presse-lors-du-premier-meeting-du-candidat-eric-zemmour-4080905
—part of a broader atmosphere of violence that saw Zemmour supporters throw
punches and chairs at anti-racism protesters, and one attendee grab Zemmour
himself by the neck
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/06/europe/french-far-right-zemmour-headlock-intl/index.html
. At one point, a group of attendees started chanting that a crew from
Quotidien, a French TV show, were “collaborators”; security spirited the
journalists away as a precaution. (They later reentered the venue.) Zemmour had
taken aim at Quotidien in his campaign launch video
https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/elections/presidentielle/meeting-de-zemmour-des-journalistes-de-quotidien-exfiltres-et-insultes_AV-202112050217.html
. Some parallels between him and Trump seem self-evident.
Below, more on Eric Zemmour and the French presidential election:
Another Trump parallel:
Bloomberg’s Daniel Zuidijk recently explored the “online ecosystem” that has
exploded around Zemmour
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-14/an-online-army-is-drumming-up-support-for-a-french-extremist?sref=2ZOctl2V
, which “works much the same way as the coalition of interests on social media
that cheered” Trump in the runup to the 2016 US election. The ownership of many
groups and pages supporting Zemmour remains unclear, Zuidijk wrote. “At least
one example seen by Bloomberg has connections to white supremacy. Posts in the
group, which is not being named here to avoid promoting the site, was started
by a page with links to a website against inter-racial marriage.”
Old acquaintances:
In October, Le Monde’s Guillemette Faure spoke with members of “a new category
of journalist”: those who worked with Zemmour prior to his political rise
https://www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/article/2021/10/17/je-ne-l-aimais-deja-pas-en-journaliste-alors-en-politique-les-ex-collegues-d-eric-zemmour_6098737_4500055.html
, and had recently been tapped as sources for the rash of media coverage about
his candidacy. “He’s never managed a team, let alone himself,” one said; “I
already didn’t like him as a journalist,” another added, “so in politics…” One
journalist said that they were invited on TV for a segment comparing Zemmour
and Trump. “I refused,” they said.
Counterprogramming:
In scheduling his first official rally for yesterday
https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2021/12/05/election-presidentielle-2022-eric-zemmour-veut-faire-une-demonstration-de-force-pour-son-meeting-a-villepinte_6104806_6059010.html
, Zemmour stole the media thunder of Valérie Pécresse, who leads the region
around Paris and was selected on Saturday to be the presidential candidate for
Les Républicains, France’s establishment right-wing party. Pécresse beat out
Éric Ciotti, a French lawmaker who is to her right politically. Zemmour—whose
outsized media footprint helped set the agenda around the party’s candidate
selection process—has described Ciotti as his “friend” and called on
disaffected Républicain supporters to support his campaign.
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