Friday, July 11, 2008

The Enderlin affair

The Weekly Standard is not one of my usual browsing stops, but this piece by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet about the long-running journalistic and legal controversy in France surrounding an iconic image from the second intifida is worth a glance if you're interested in journalism, France, and/or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Caution: she has a definite point of view, and without having read anything else on this case I'm not in a position to endorse what she says.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank heaven for Moutet

hank_F_M said...

I haven’t been intentionally following but I every couple of months I run across a new article on it. The progression was interesting starting from complaints the initial story had to holes in, then more and more information coming out to pretty much stabling intentional fraud on the par to stringer and perhaps in France 2. France 2 suing for libel was what broke it open. Even the pro-public official bias of French Libel Law was not enough to stop forcing out information. That article agrees with what I have read over time.

LFC said...

Interesting. The question whether there was intentional deception on France 2's part seems still open, but if I had to guess my guess would be that Enderlin made an unintentional careless mistake in running the film initially and then tried to cover his tracks rather than admit error. This seems to be Moutet's view also, reading between the lines of her article.