By Dave Lindorff
French Socialist 'partisans' celebrate winning the presidency
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Reading, watching and listening to the mainstream media in America, it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between journalism and rank propaganda. Consider the coverage of the French parliamentary election currently underway.
Most Americans who read newspapers probably learned about this via the Associated Press report that went out on the weekend for Monday's papers (AP is the de facto "foreign correspondent" for almost every newspaper in America now that all but a few papers have eliminated their foreign reporting staffs). It stated that recently elected Socialist President Francois Hollande's Socialist Party "stands positioned to take control of the lower house of parliament."
Okay so far, right? But then the reporter, Elaine Ganley, who may well have been writing from the US given that the article, as it appeared in my paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, didn't carry a Paris dateline, or indeed any dateline at all, went on to say "...so he can revamp a country his partisans see as too capitalist for the French.
Ganley went on to warn readers that "A leftist victory in the voting, five weeks after Hollande took office, would brutally jar the French political landscape."
Whoa! Last time I looked, "brutally" was a word reserved for nasty over-the-top abusive behavior. I suspect that the hundreds of thousands of Parisian "partisans" who poured into the streets around the Bastille on learning of Hollande's victory would not consider their victory "brutal" for France. In fact, if anything, they would probably say that the experience of several years of austerity and a raising of the French retirement age by the ousted conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy was what was brutal.
Would Ganley have written that the election of conservative Georges Pompidou as President following the second and final term of the last French Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, "brutally jarring" for the French political landscape? ...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening, the new independent two-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1202
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