Last Monday, May 9, the spokesman of the Russian Embassy was interviewed in the morning and listeners write. I quote them: “I found it unbearable that we leave such a media space to such propaganda. The duty of information and impartiality is not an authorization to broadcast everything. Pluralism cannot justify an impartial treatment of information Russia and the broadcasting of outright lies. Free expression has no place in Russia. Democracy deserves more respect and public radio is not a social network.”
Emmanuelle Daviet: How do you respond to these remarks?
Matthew Mondoloni: That they are ambivalent, but I can understand that there too, the listener was shocked by this interview. But it is precisely because we are impartial that we must give everyone a voice, and hear different points of view. That does not mean, and I remind you, that we subscribe to it in any way. And moreover, Marc Fauvelle, who interviewed the spokesperson for the Russian Embassy, did his job as a journalist, confronted him, sometimes with his contradictions, asked him why he did not use the word war.
It should also be noted that the spokesperson was invited in a very specific context, that is to say this date of 9 May which is not insignificant since, in Russia as in countries formerly of the Soviet Union, this date is important since it celebrates the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazism, and there was a parade that day in Russia. So we made the choice to have the spokesperson for the Russian Embassy. But as at 6:40 am, an hour earlier, we had the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of European Affairs, since this date is also Europe Day.
Specifically, we are talking about May 9 and we continue with this message : “I would like to know the editorial interest of covering the Russian military parade on May 9. It is unprecedented. And apart from galvanizing the support of Vladimir Putin, I do not understand why so much light is given on this government in the context current”, a listener tells us.
How do you justify this editorial choice?
We have already covered it in the past, but where the listener is absolutely right, not in the same way, that is to say that we were able to do reports that were broadcast after the parade, in particular the so-called Parade of Immortals in Russia, which was quite a large parade. There, we chose to do it with more regular direct from our permanent correspondent, Sylvain Tronchet, on site. Quite simply because of this very particular context which is that of the war in Ukraine.
We knew that Vladimir Putin wanted to make this day and this parade a show of force. There must have been a lot of soldiers parading in front of him, planes that ultimately couldn’t pass because of the weather, the Kremlin said. So they wanted to impress the West in particular. So it was a question of looking at it, but again in a totally objective way, in order to be able to tell it to our listeners.
We end with a subject that comes up fairly regularly in emails from listeners. I read you a message that summarizes well the content of what we receive: “I don’t understand why journalists don’t use the term far left when they talk about La France insoumise, the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, unlike the far right, an expression which very often qualifies the name of Marine Le Pen’s party.”
This has been a very frequent remark for several months. Matthieu Mondoloni, what are the instructions on this subject?
Already, I want to say that these are not instructions that we journalists took alone, because of ideological biases. Of course not. It is the specialists, the doctors in political science, who will break down the political spectrum in the country, and who will classify parties from the extreme right to the extreme left.
There is a French extreme left, it is an extreme left which in general defends theories which will be: the revolution in the street and not only by the ballot boxes, even not at all by the ballot boxes, anti-capitalist parties etc etc who are ranked on the far left.
Why is the far left not a qualifier used for the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon or insubordinate France? Quite simply because it is what is called the radical left. In political science why radical, for example, the program of Jean-Luc Mélenchon is much less radical than that of François Mitterrand in 1981, there were much fewer things that could be qualified as radical in this program. So yes, the radical left is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, it’s not the extreme left, it’s not me who says it, I have nothing to do with it.
And then, on the far right, that’s something else again. And I looked in particular at Nicolas Lebourg, who is a specialist in the French far right, who is sometimes invited on franceinfo and on other branches of the Radio France group, he defines very well what the far right is, it’s on the extreme right in fact, it’s parties that will define “them” against “us”. There is always an enemy who can be an enemy from within, but very often from outside, and who will call into question the block of constitutionality; in these programs, ultimately, we will want to put an end to the separation of institutions, the separation of powers, and so on.
So these are fundamentals and this is how the extreme right is defined. Marine Le Pen, as we know, refuses this qualifier. Nevertheless, in certain aspects of his program, there are always these points.