When archives do have a real sense of humour

Late October 2009, Le Petit Journal by Yann Barthès (Canal+) causes a sensation, making French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements sound ridiculous.  “I’m not here to say what you have already been told”, he says in front of farmers, echoing previous statements, a mere “copy & paste of a speech dating back from ten months”, according to Yann Barthès.

How comes that journalists writing for well-known newspapers actually remained completely silent about this? How comes that this Petit Journal, presenting what politics looks like behind the scenes, actually is, under the cloak of humour, an area of independent information which should make jealous any journalist from Le Monde, L’Humanité and other newspapers whose archives departments no longer are what they were.

Any meticulous journalist should obviously, while writing their papers, check archives on the issue they are dealing with and should highlight this kind of word abuse, more generally, any kind of misinformation. This being said, it is easy to believe that journalists have become puppets for the established order.     

Is all this really done on purpose? Does the profession consciously act for the established powers or is it forced to botch its papers, because of insufficient means? Some journalists admit it: they do no longer have the time to check what they are supposed to with their archives departments, departments which have often faced job cuts because of a decrease in the sales of newspapers – in France and elsewhere; Germany looking like an exception thanks to a real culture of subscription.

Humorists are therefore filling the void left by journalists, making themselves the new spokespeople for an informative counter-culture. A shame…