An opening towards the youth. This is always how the week of the Bayeux-Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents begins. Journalists who have worked in countries at war meet students in schools in Normandy. “It is fundamental, really one of the challenges of our profession” explains Franck Mathevon, director of international information at Radio France. “It is truly a democratic issue. Today, you have to be as close as possible to the information and therefore go into the field, be at the source to transmit the truth”. An increasingly important issue in the face of the risks of misinformation and manipulation on social networks. This year, nearly 2,500 high school students and apprentices from 70 establishments in the Region will thus award “their” Bayeux prize for war correspondents, after viewing the selected reports. This prize for high school students reflects the view of young civil society.
Franck Mathevon leads a team of twenty journalists specializing in international information. “We always have one or two teams in Ukraine. We also work in Paris with a Ukrainian and a Russian journalist who allow us to translate all the comments made as well as possible.”. This system also includes a permanent correspondent in Moscow and soon another in kyiv, from November and for successive periods of two months.
Weigh every word for reporting
Before directing this international news service, Franck Mathevon experienced the field. These reports with helmets and bulletproof vest in addition to the recording equipment. “These are challenging missions that require a lot of logistics”explains the man who spent three weeks in Ukraine in early spring 2022. There, it is the confrontation with war and atrocities when he meets civilians. Sometimes it takes ask yourself the question of broadcasting the most unbearable moments of a testimony collected at the microphone. “When a woman, a Ukrainian, recounts the rapes she may have suffered at the hands of Russian soldiers, obviously you have to be very careful about what you say on the air. It is not a question of watering down the subject, but of ensuring that reality is transmitted in the fairest way possible but that it is bearable for our listeners.”. Great precautions are also taken when he perceives calls for violence.
One of the other difficulties is to provide reliable information in this conflict where Russians and Ukrainians transfer the responsibility for air attacks on civilians. Franck Mathevon was in Ukraine during the bombing of the Mariupol theater on March 16. “It was very difficult to get information on the spot. The networks were completely cut off. And then we were lucky, because sometimes you have to, to be online with someone who had been able to get out of the Mariupol theater just before. A woman with her two children who had arrived several kilometers from the target area and who was therefore reachable at that time. She told us precisely what had happened in the theater, that artillery fire was coming from the Russian side”. A valuable testimony in a context of information warfare. “That’s why it’s very important to go to the field. The truth has great difficulty in triumphing in times of war and this is particularly the case in Ukraine. There is a very strong misinformation on the Russian side in particular, even if we must also be wary of propaganda on the Ukrainian side”.
Franck Mathevon will be present on Saturday in Bayeux to lead a forum on the media (Espace Saint-Patrice from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) as part of this 29th edition of the Bayeux-Calvados-Normandy Prize for war correspondents. For seven months Radio France has also been offering a series of podcasts to understand the evolution of the conflict. Documents produced thanks to the continuous presence of reporters and technicians on Ukrainian soil.