Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen face off in French election Media restraint on leak impresses US
WATERSHED MOMENT Macron never held elected office
French voters headed to the polls on Sunday to pick a new president, choosing between centrist Emmanuel Macron and farright leader Marine Le Pen in a crucial election for the future of the country and Europe.
Polling day follows a rollercoaster campaign marked by scandal, repeated surprises and a last-minute hacking attack targeting Macron, a 39-year-old former investment banker who has never held elected office.
The run-off vote pits the proEurope, pro-business Macron against anti-immigration, anti-EU Le Pen, two radically different visions that underline a split in Western democracies.
Le Pen, 48, has portrayed the ballot as a contest between the “globalists” represented by her rival -- those in favour of open trade, immigration and shared sovereignty -- against the “nationalists” who defend strong borders and national identities
She is hoping to spring a shock result that would resonate as widely as Britain’s Brexit decision to withdraw from the European Union or the unexpected victory of US President Donald Trump.
“The world is watching,” said 32-year-old marketing worker Marie Piot as she voted in a working-class part of northwest Paris.
“After Brexit and Trump, it’s as if we are the last bastion of the Enlightenment,” she said.
Le Pen cast her ballot in her northern stronghold of HeninBeaumont, where bare-breasted Femen activists climbed scaffolding on a church and unfurled a banner reading: “Power for Marine, despair for Marianne,” referring to the symbol of France.
Macron voted in the northern seaside resort of Le Touquet.
Hours after the dump of hacked emails from the campaign of French presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron, a writer with American news site The Daily Beast tweeted admiringly: “Most French media ignoring the hack. See? It can be done. It’s called news judgment.”
In a similar situation in 2016, American media had raced each other to report the daily dump from WikiLeaks of emails and documents obtained allegedly by Russian hackers from the Democratic party’s computer systems and the Clinton campaign, and had breathlessly reported everything from swearing by Hillary Clinton’s campaign official Neera Tandon to election strategies.
That was the comparison The Daily Beast writer, Michael Tomasky, seemed to have been flagging with his tweet that had struck a chord — it has been retweeted more than 3,500 times and collected more than 8,000 likes.
“This is a plea,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci in BuzzFeed, to French media outlets. “Do not get played the way the US press got played, gullibly falling into the trap set for it. And don’t ignore what happens online. These hacks are merely the stage for the misinformation machine.”
The blackout of the content of the hacked documents was covered widely in US media, and commented upon — sometimes with a trace of self-deprecation, such as this one from The Washington Post: “In the United States, such leaked content would be the stuff of wall-to-wall media coverage.”
And Tanden, a victim of the 2016 US elections hacking, retweeted several posts making the same point.