B E B E R E

Heartrending.

I get an rss feed from Le Monde, the "moderate" French paper...over the course of three days, all I've seen is coverage of the increasing Palestinian death tolls due to "Israeli aggression" and fiery rhetoric from Abbas about the derailment of the "Peace Process" (code language to me of the Israelis not putting up with the Palestinian BS.) Nothing about the Israeli side of things, though.

What's so piss-poor pathetic about all this is, back when I was a student in France during the first Gulf War, I remember there being actual French Media bureaus with real live reporters doing Real Reporting Live* from Tel-Aviv, Eilat, Jerusalem. A2 (Now called France 2, the subject of a big trial over falsification of photos regarding a Palestinian/IDF shootout) 's offices were particularly badly hit then, and I remember vividly the Apple A2 logo pinned to plastic wrap that was there in place of a wall that had been blasted away by a missile a couple hours earlier.

Do the stations still have posts there?

When did French media start its decadence? About the same time as in the US? Was it such a creepy slow thing that I never noticed until too late?

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* During that time, I remember quizzing the 'man on the street' about what they thought "garder un profil bas" meant. (That was the buzz term at the time - as far as I know, there still is no good translation of "keep a low profile" today.) No one really knew, but they accepted it. I think it was Gen. Schwartzkopf who kept using it in the briefing tent in Kuwait.