The U.S. press is losing interest as the winners of France’s election are barred from taking power.
By Paul Hedreen, FAIR
One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.
Despite corporate media’s supposed dedication to preserving Western democracy, the Washington Post and the New York Times have mostly stayed silent on French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respect the winners of the recent election. Since the left coalition supplied its pick for prime minister on July 23, the Times has reported on the issue twice, once when Macron declared he wouldn’t name a prime minister until after the Olympics (7/23/24), and again nearly seven weeks after the July 7 election (8/23/24). Neither story appeared on the front page.
It’s not that the Times didn’t think the French elections were worth reporting on; the paper ran five news articles (6/30/24, 6/30/24, 7/1/24, 7/1/24, 7/7/24), including two on the front page of its print edition, from June 30–July 7 on “France’s high-stakes election” that “could put the country on a new course” (6/30/24). But as it became clear that Macron was not going to name a prime minister, transforming the snap election into a constitutional crisis, the US paper of record seemingly lost interest.
Since July 23, the Post has published two news items from the AP (8/23/24, 8/27/24), plus an opinion piece by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstader (7/24/24), who suggested that France’s best path forward is “a broad alliance of the center”—conveniently omitting that the leftist coalition in fact beat Macron’s centrists in the July 7 election. In what little reporting there is, journalists have been satisfied to stick to Macron’s framing of “stability,” omitting any critique of an executive exploiting holes in the French constitution.
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