More baby news: Rachida Dati, the 42 year old French Justice Minister, is, like Bristol Palin, pregnant. As Art Goldhammer says, however, they do things differently in France. Dati says she has no intention of revealing the father’s identity and offers this marvellous comment: “I have a very complicated private life, and that’s where I draw the line with the press. I won’t have anything to say on that subject.”
Meanwhile, the Times’ Charles Bremner has a pop at French hypocrisy vis a vis privacy and the coverage of the Sarkozy administration:
The complete silence on the identify of Dati’s partner looks more like old-fashioned deference to the governing class.
There was another, related, example of the deference phenomenon today. Most of the media were having fun with Sarkozy’s Corsican blunder (last post), reporting the political row and deploring his devotion to his show-biz cronies. But the story was not deemed fit for readers of Le Figaro, a venerable national daily. The newspaper, which is owned by Serge Dassault, a big Sarkozy supporter, can rarely bring itself to report anything embarrassing to the President. So it reduced the Corsica yarn to a few brief lines with no allusion to a row.
Chaps in glass houses ought not to chuck rocks! A newspaper proprietor influences coverage to protect his friends and business interests? That could never happen in Britain…
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