Hollande Affair Rankles the British Press

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/world/europe/hollande-affair-rankles-the-british-press.html

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LONDON — In the annals of British tabloid journalism, nothing titillates quite so much as scandal fusing sex and politics, disgracing the high and mighty.

First, there is the revelation of transgression, the “gotcha” moment. Indignant denial gives way to shamed confession. Flanked by steely-eyed spouse and bewildered family, the errant politician mumbles an apology and quits. Hubris, error and the fall from grace follow one another with the inevitability of Aristotelian tragedy.

With some small variants, that is how it is done here.

Imagine, then, the sense of affront this week when, just across the Channel, President François Hollande of France simply refused to follow the British (and American) playbook, stonewalling at a lengthy news conference about a clandestine liaison whose disclosure sent his full-time partner to the hospital to recover from the shock.

For British journalists among the hundreds of reporters packed into the Élysée Palace in Paris for the presidential New Year’s news conference, the outrage was almost palpable.

“Morality does matter,” the columnist Alison Phillips fumed in The Daily Mirror tabloid, criticizing the president’s equally indignant refusal to discuss what he termed private matters. “Not necessarily the morals of afternoon delight with a mistress — but the morality of whether you can tell the truth.

“If the French are too high-minded for such honesty,” she concluded, “then more fool them.”

The harrumphs reflected many fundamental differences between neighbors separated by 22 miles of water, language, culture, self-perception and centuries of history.

French journalists, their British counterparts say, are reticent to the point of obsequiousness when it comes to ferreting out embarrassing truth about their leaders.

In 2011, only the arrest in New York on sexual assault charges of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a potential presidential candidate who was then head of the International Monetary Fund, forced French journalists to open a still inconclusive debate about their attitude toward the libidinous lives of the powerful.

Here, by contrast, politicians complain about the sharp-clawed instincts of a press corps that Tony Blair once likened to a “feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.”

Mr. Blair’s assessment seems shared by French journalists who acknowledge showing what a British correspondent called “a patriotism and deference in French culture that we don’t have here,” and who argue that their refusal to stray down the byways of prurient scandal keeps them focused on the real issues.

That reflex seems to suit Mr. Hollande who, said the columnist Quentin Letts in The Daily Mail, wants “to be remembered for his policies on unemployment, competitiveness, the budget and defense.”

The deeper issue relates to fundamental notions of privacy, particularly as applied to the boudoir.

“When voters elect a leader they vote for the package — the policies and the personality,” Ms. Phillips wrote in The Daily Mirror. “They have a right to know if their leader is a liar and if he has more pressing matters on his mind than their future.”

The belief that privacy ends where power — or celebrity — begins underlay the phone-hacking scandal that caused a huge crisis in British public life, prompting politicians’ demands for statutory regulation of the press for the first time in 300 years.

But no set of rules is likely to bury the deeply held, headline-making, circulation-increasing conviction that reporters have a duty to expose their leaders’ wrongdoing.

If Mr. Hollande’s travails were transplanted to London or Washington, said the columnist Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, “we would be saying that the embattled prime minister/president was fighting for his political life. His job would be deemed to be hanging from a thread. Some at least would be predicting resignation.”

Against that, Jon Henley, another Guardian journalist, wrote with a hint of resignation, “they do things differently in France,” proving, perhaps, that, whatever the shadings, his French colleagues do not have a monopoly on the Gallic shrug.