Blackout, different media culture helped limit Macron hack impact
PARIS — French readers awoke Monday to headlines about its young presidentelect, Emmanuel Macron, and his decisive defeat of the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
What they did not find were details of the “massive” hacking attack on the Macron campaign that was announced late Friday night.
News of the hacking lit up social media, especially in places where far-right activists have joined together to spread extremist messages in Europe as well as in the United States, where the attack echoed one on the Democratic National Committee last year.
But in France, the leak did not get much traction. It certainly did not appear to give an edge to Le Pen, who won 33.9 percent to Macron’s 66.1 percent on Sunday. The hacking operation was met, instead, with silence, disdain and even scorn. Why? First, French news outlets respected the blackout. The documents landed at the 11th hour, without time for journalists to scrutinize them properly before the ban went into effect.
Second, the news media heeded an admonition by the government’s campaign regulatory body not to publish false news. The Macron campaign said that fake documents had been mixed in with authentic ones.
But there was yet another crucial factor — France does not have an equivalent to the thriving tabloid culture in Britain or the robust right-wing broadcast media in the United States.
“We don’t have a Fox News in France,” said Johan Hufnagel, managing editor of the leftist daily Libération. “There’s no broadcaster with a wide audience and personalities who build this up and try to use it for their own agendas.”
Hufnagel said that Libération would take time to evaluate and verify the leaked documents before writing articles about them. In Saturday’s edition, Libération traced how news of the hacked documents had spread across the internet.
But after the blackout ended Sunday night, French news outlets reported little to no information about the leaked documents. Most said only that the French authorities had opened an investigation.
That reticence stretched across the landscape of newspapers in France, regardless of political leaning — including Le Monde, the country’s’s leading daily, which generally takes a center-left stance, and the conservative daily Le Figaro. Several weekly newsmagazines — the conservative Le Point, the centrist L’Express and the left-leaning L’Obs — also held back.
The Macron campaign has said little about the hacking and leaks beyond a statement late Friday night — just minutes before the blackout began — describing the operation as “massive and coordinated” and an effort to destabilize French democracy.
For now, it appears the attack turned up mostly mundane documents. Although the coverage has hardly been comprehensive, no real smoking guns have been uncovered.
“The good news is that there was an attempt at destabilization that didn’t work,” said Céline Pigalle, the top editor at BFM-TV, a private broadcaster. “The elements weren’t strong enough. But what would have happened if they had been?”
Pigalle said the late-breaking document dump provided a reason to revise the news blackout law. It was created to give citizens time to reflect before voting, but in the era of social media, it gives anyone with a Twitter account an edge over France’s respected news outlets.
NEWARK, N.J. — United Airlines has apologized to a French woman after she wound up on a plane to San Francisco instead of Paris from a New Jersey airport.
WABC-TV reported that Lucie Bahetoukilae was scheduled to fly from Newark to Paris last month. Bahetoukilae, who only speaks French, ended up in San Francisco after boarding a plane at the gate that corresponded with her ticket.
Bahetoukilae’s niece, Diane Miantsoko, said United made a last-minute gate change that her aunt missed, but that United staffers scanned her aunt’s ticket and seated her in an open seat anyway.
She eventually made it to Paris after an 11-hour layover in San Francisco and 28 hours of travel.