Miss Kolka

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Media egos and the real life | 19 septembre 2008

I have been contemplating how obsessed France is with its media, or more exactly obsessed by the people in it. Beeing a journalist here has a total different meaning to what I imagine it has in other countries. At least from what I have been able to experience in Iceland and observe in England.

A french journalist is someone who is admired, whether he is liked or not. It is a job alot of people aspire to and not because they want to "tell the truth", be useful to society or to others but because they want to become famous. And indeed, it is a good career move, given you know the right people (its all about your address book), have the right name or parents and remember as many intellectual quotes as possible. Then you have a chance. And once you are in - you can be a top notch celebrity!

(Ok, to be fair, there might be a few who are interested in "spreading the word", "educate the masses" or simply have a job where they can travel around the world to meet interesting people. But I think they are very few (most journalists working inside a dark office) and they also play the game of recognising big names and if they can, they would just love to become their new best friends. Which makes this business one of the most hypocritical worlds you can imagine, along with the world of politicians, and actually, these two often go together.)

How often do you see presenters and journalists being guests on other people's shows? Where they are stroked the right way and their egos blown out of proportion? All the time. It has become perfectly normal to invite the "star of the 20H" (the person presenting the evening news) to talk about his/her life and opinions they might have on almost anything. Like we care. Often these conversations (especially where there is more than one tv personality invited) go into some obscur corners of the tv/media/political/-or entertainement world and things are implied without a general explanaition to the viewer. Debates are often false debates since important information is omitted, like why, who and how. People in the media business (and political sphere) have all the pieces of (informal) information but no one is informing the public. Journalists are not writing for you, they're writing for their friends, since they are the only ones who have the missing piece of the puzzle. Its frustrating. I find French journalism frustrating and often disrespectful.

Wonder why I keep doing what I do...

Publié par Kolka à 17:44:20 dans Miss Kolka | Commentaires (0) | Permaliens