Le Monde qui tombe ? LA FIN DU MONDE ? Tradition and Change in the French Press

Le Monde, or rather its current management team of publisher and editor JeanMarie Colombani, managing editor Edwy Plenel, and director-of-the-board Alain Minc, has been the critical target over the past year of several best-selling books, accompanied by scores of articles in the rest of the French press. This avalanche of unwelcome attention for the newspaper was launched with the 630-page, exhaustively documented La Face cachée du Monde (The Hidden Face of Le Monde), by Pierre Péan, perhaps France’s most highly-regarded investigative journalist,1 and Philippe Cohen, economics editor for the newsweekly Marianne. Other critical books that appeared during 2003 included Ma part du Monde by former Le Monde journalist Alain Rollat; Le Pouvoir du Monde by Bernard Poulet, an assistant managing editor at business magazine L’Expansion; Bien entendu ... c’est off by former Le Monde political reporter Daniel Carton and Le Cauchemar médiatique by former Le Monde television chronicler Daniel Schneidermann.2 These authors present a sometimes contradictory array of criticisms; what they almost all seem to agree is that over the past decade, Le Monde has amassed and misused its increasing power for largely selfish purposes; that Colombani, Plenel and Minc have bullied both would-be allies and enemies in the process committing serious ethical or even legal misdeeds, all while espousing a holier-than-thou moral code; and that as a result, the newspaper has “brought about a veritable degradation in democratic life”3 in France.