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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
Monday, July 4th 11.00 - 12.30 (Room 4)
French war correspondence: An original model of journalism or a case of
Americanization/globalization of norms and practices?
Boudana, Sandrine
New York University, New York City, USA
Scholars, such as Rodney Benson, have defined French and American journalisms
as opposite ideal-types. Since the 19th century, American journalism had advocated
objectivity and empiricist focus on facts, while the French model had been rooted in a
political and literary tradition. However, it seems, as Jean Chalaby argues, that the
American standards came to define professional journalism as early as the beginning
of the 20th century, and that there has been an Americanization of the French
journalistic norms and practices. However the rejection of objectivity as a standard in
the past decades might have, in turn, stopped this Americanization or led to the
definition of a globalized model.
Focusing on war correspondence, this paper aims to evaluate to what extent French
standards are still original, in what they diverge from and in what they converge with
the American standards.
The study is based on interviews with 25 French and American war correspondents
and the analysis of newspaper articles covering violent foreign conflicts.
The interviews show that French and American war correspondents identify the same
fundamental values, accuracy and fairness. They also mention the same criteria for
the definition of good journalistic practices, such as evidence-based statements or fair
characterization of the protagonists in news reports. Although the importance granted
to each of these criteria might diverge, as well as the way of evaluating them, the
findings indicate a convergence of American and French practices.
However analysis of French newspaper articles covering foreign conflicts reveals a
gap between what the interviewed journalists say that should be done and what
journalists actually did. French war correspondents are essentially authors, whose
personal presence is more marked than the American’s and who ultimately fulfil a
bardic function.
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