Le Canard enchaîné, a model for investigative journalism in the internet age?
The title of this post is both ironic, and not.
Few people outside France know about Le Canard enchaîné. But in France, this weekly 6 8-page newspaper has the power to bring down politicians and CEOs. It is a uniquely French institution, and I don’t know of any other outlets worldwide that are even remotely comparable. It has no website, carries no advertising, and is recession-proof.
Le Canard, as it is universally known, has existed since the early 20th century. It is wholly owned by its reporters, who may not sell shares to outsiders. Its journalists are better paid than any of their peers, in exhange of which they may not own shares in other companies, or receive gifts, awards or medals (a big deal in status-obssessed France). Even though it has always been very profitable, it holds enough cash in the bank to run for three years with no revenue. Even though it is under no legal obligation to release financial information as a small private company, it appends its financial statements to its last issue of each year.
So what justifies the respect and even fear it inspires, these onerous constraints and a profitability so unusual these days that it practically seems like an insult? Well, to put it bluntly, Le Canard is the only newspaper in France that practices investigative reporting (of a sort, at least). Practically every political and economic scandal of the past 30 years (and many before that) was originally broken by Le Canard. Each weekly issue includes priceless little nuggets such as off-the-record quotes by prominent politicians, behind-the-scenes dirt, that sort of thing. Le Canard describes itself as a “satirical weekly newspaper” ; every bit of news is reported in a very harsh mocking style, and the newspaper includes a section of political contrepèteries, a typically French form of graphic sexual pun.
The scandals broken by Le Canard are too many to list, but they include then-President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s acceptance of diamonds as gifts from the ruler of Centrafrique, a scandal which contributed to the failure of his reelection bid ; the Elf Affair and the Affaire des Frigates, political kickback scandals that reverberated throughout the 1990s and ended the careers of many politicians on both sides of the aisle ; Jacques Chirac’s numerous corrupt dealings… More recently, after the eight Bulgarian nurses held by Lybia were liberated in part thanks to Nicolas Sarkozy’s lobbying, and the French government assured that no bribes were part of the deal, Le Canard printed a classified copy of the deal, which included arms purchases, oil concessions and the like.
When I was working in politics, we young staffers who shunned the printed press in favor of the wires and blogs all spent our Wednesday mornings reading that week’s issue of Le Canard (oui, with croissants and bitter espressos). It’s an entertaining read and simply includes too much information that you can’t do without. But the real reason politicians and CEOs read it is because they fear it. They don’t know on any given week whether Le Canard will print something that will make their next week hell, or worse. It’s hard to overstate Le Canard‘s aura. In the 1970s the President tried to have their offices wired, but thanks to a source Le Canard broke the news of the attempted tap that same week, bringing the operation to a close before it had even begun. Since then, politicians haven’t tried to touch it. It routinely prints false information but despite France’s tough anti-libel laws it is never sued, in part because the people concerned are wary of attracting publicity but mostly because they’re afraid of reprisals. It is never even sued when it leaks classified military information, which it has done several times before (most recently, about French troops’ equipment, or lack thereof, in Afghanistan).
For there’s a dark side to Le Canard. Despite a clear hard-left bias it claims to be non-partisan, and it certainly breaks embarrassing news about left-wing figures. But the only big scandal of the past decades that it did not break was the existence of then-Socialist President François Mitterrand’s love child, even though it now admits it had the story. It claims it did so because “Le Canard stops at the bedroom’s threshold” but they had no qualms about exposing e.g. fornicating Catholic ecclesiastics and now they certainly make much hay of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s (admittedly public and tumultuous) private life. The same strict rules that serve to protect Le Canard‘s independence also ensure its unaccountability.
I say that Le Canard is the only French newspaper to practice investigative journalism of a sort. There are two clauses in there. It is the only French newspaper to practice investigative journalism: it’s a sad and unfortunate fact that French newspapers don’t do investigative reporting. They simply don’t. The French press has a proud tradition of commentary dating back to Emile Zola but no tradition of investigative journalism, at least not in the press (to be fair, France features investigative writers much more prominently than other comparable countries). When the press do break news, it is news that is leaked to them, not news that is actively investigated by the muckracking, rogue reporters who are so much part of our collective imagination. Which brings us to the second clause: Le Canard does investigative journalism of a sort. Where does Le Canard get all its scoops?
Le Canard‘s reporting consists of, as an insider told me, “opening the mail.” Le Canard doesn’t seek out news, the news comes to them. Insiders and connected people leak news to it all the time. Sometimes for moral reasons. Mostly for the reasons people leak stuff to the press: to feel important, to get back at someone. Because they have an axe to grind. This has two woeful consequences for Le Canard.
First is that fact-checking is not really a priority at Le Canard. When they print true stuff, it’s damaging, but they also print a lot of bull.
Second is that Le Canard is often instrumentalized. Le Canard‘s main sources are not politicians who try to shoot down other politicians (I think they’re too scared that Le Canard would break it as “A tries to leak X about B”) but the powerful technocrats who reside within the bowels of France’s gargantuan democracy and obstruct reform. These mandarins often try to take down overzealous ministers. Strikes are popular, but so are targeted leaks to Le Canard. This was the case of Hervé Gaymard, a very talented, young, reformist Finance Minister whose career basically blew up mid-air because of revelations about his lifestyle in Le Canard, leaks that had the fingerprints of the very powerful Finance Ministry that he had taken a stab at reforming all over them. This, it seems to me, runs in contradiction to Le Canard‘s mission as an independent bulwark that holds the feet of the rich and powerful to account. Practically no politicians and few CEOs (especially in these bailout-begging days) have real power in France these days, such is the power of the bureaucracy and the unions. But Le Canard is not interested in the work and less attention-grabbing headlines that come with bringing accountability to those.
So: Le Canard, a model for investigative journalism in the internet age?
The only media outlet that I can really compare Le Canard to is something like Gawker or Valleywag, with its tone, its vibrant tipline, and its sometimes cavalier approach to facts and actual reporting (ahem). I’m not sure that a newspaper like Le Canard could exist in a country that doesn’t have France’s idiosyncrasies, but if it did, I’m convinced it would exist in blog form. For all its flaws, I think France is better off with Le Canard than without it, and a blog that fulfilled the same purpose in the U.S. or elsewhere would probably be a good thing.
It also shows something that an outlet like The Economist shows: print media that offer true value for money can be profitable, and even very profitable, and remain so for the foreseeable future. So, who knows, maybe a 6 8-page newspaper with no webspite printed on crappy paper with fingertips-staining black ink is the future of reporting. Or at least a future. I wouldn’t be surprised.
I looked up Herve Gaymard on wikipedia, and the description of the scandal there is “accepting lavish, state-funded perks, then attempting to lie in interviews.” That sounds worse than “revelations about his lifestyle,” which made me, at least, think they discovered he was a swinger or some such. Are you sure you’re not shading the truth because you are sympathetic to Gaymard’s politics?
— salacious · Feb 13, 12:22 PM · #
This is one of the greatest blog posts I’ve ever read. Damn.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Feb 13, 12:26 PM · #
Are there really “muckraking reporters” in the U.S. to constrast with the “read the mail from bureaucrats” type at Le Canard? Watergate, for example, turns out to have been leaked from a disgruntled bureaucrat. Has there ever been an instance of investigative journalism where the bureaucrat was the bad guy and the elected politician or CEO was the good guy?
— David t. · Feb 13, 12:35 PM · #
salacious: yes, I am sympathetic to Hervé Gaymard’s politics, even more to his person, and to do the whole full disclosure thing, I know him (vaguely). But your Wikipedia quote is even more misleading than my turn of phrase. ;)
The “scandal” was that when he became Finance Minister, the ministry rented for him a large and admittedly luxurious apartment. This was because he has 8 small children and the apartment inside the ministry that ministers traditionally occupy was too small to accommodate his family. When Le Canard broke the story, including the price of the apartment, Gaymard didn’t lie so much as commit PR suicide. Instead of saying the right thing, “This is completely legal and customary,” which was true, he chose to stress his (also true) humble roots as the son of small farmers. At one point he claimed to have no property in Paris he could live in, and then it came out that he did own a flat (but it was already rented). The real reason he resigned, or was made to was simply because he had tried to take on the Finance Ministry bureaucracy and Jacques Chirac preferred to sacrifice a protégé rather than let this derail his agenda. I know the Gaymard story inside-out, in part because I am attached to him, which made me conduct some actual investigation after he resigned, and I know the score from trusted sources inside the media, his staff, and the Finance Ministry bureaucracy. He was definitely guilty of incompetence for a week or two, but not impropriety.
Conor: Thank you!
David T: Most great stories start with a leak, but after the leak investigative reporters do (at least to my knowledge) perform actual research, digging around, etc. At Le Canard and other French outlets, not so much.
— PEG · Feb 13, 01:17 PM · #
Very good post—I’d never heard of Le Canard.
Do you think there are structural features that make Le Canard take on the role that it has? That is—could it coexist with a parallel magazine that is not instrumentalized, or is instrumentalized in a different fashion (perhaps as a check on the technocrats)? Or is there some reason that only one such magazine within France’s political culture.
— Justin · Feb 13, 03:03 PM · #
That’s an excellent question! I ABSOLUTELY think there is room, particularly in France but really everywhere, for a newspaper/magazine that provides high quality investigative reporting, and that people would be ready to pay for it, whether on or offline. And I do think that Le Canard is very much a product of France’s idiosyncratic (I think that’s the word I’ve used the most since I began posting regularly here) political culture. Le Canard thrives on the very hypocrisies it denounces, and any political thinker worth his salt will tell you that the best (only?) way to defeat opposition to a system is to make it part of it. Does that mean that if there were a “true” investigative outlet it would make Le Canard redundant, and eventually extinct? I have no idea.
I don’t know if I’ve answered your question.
— PEG · Feb 13, 04:16 PM · #
Amazing blog post. I do have one question, however: If Le Canard is dependent on tips from well-connected insiders, how can competing publications emulate its success? Have outlets like Le Canard and Gawker caught lightning in a bottle, or have they hit upon a particular approach that can be replicated by more traditional publications? I get the sense that Le Canard’s amazing tip line is pretty dependent on its fearsome reputation, which makes it difficult for new outlets to marry its techniques to standard reported fair.
— Will · Feb 13, 05:29 PM · #
Will: I agree. It’s sort of like a virtuous (vicious?) cycle. Once a site becomes prominent, it’s the one you leak to, so it becomes more prominent, etc. In that regard, Le Canard might actually be better compared to the Drudge Report than Gawker. How did Drudge become Drudge? I have no flippin’ idea. But now he’s Drudge.
As for Le Canard, it’s been around FOREVER. Its first high profile target was Georges Clémenceau, who was prime minister during World War I… So yeah, a newcomer would be up against a very strong incumbent, and yet (at least in markets), scrappy newcomers take down established incumbents every day.
As I said above, I’m not sure a true investigative outlet would make Le Canard irrelevant, nor am I convinced that it should. I mean, Le Canard, for all its faults, does play a productive role in French society. It has so much aura, yes, because nobody else does true investigative reporting, but it’s not hard to imagine a world where true investigative reporting exists alongside Le Canard’s snark, off-the-record quotes, etc., and that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
— PEG · Feb 13, 06:22 PM · #
So, they do actually have a website, they just don’t put their content on it: Le Canard Enchainé
— Christopher M · Feb 13, 08:15 PM · #
“it holds enough cash in the bank to run for three years with no revenue.”
Just last week my editor said to me, “If you guard against the bad luck, all you’ll have left over is good luck.”
I will have to ask him if he is a Le Canard reader.
RE: Lightning in a bottle
I think it was a frenchman who said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I’ll add that a prepared wallet doesn’t hurt.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 13, 09:01 PM · #
Hi, I’m a french reader of Le Canard enchaîné.
There are few mistakes in your note.
Le Canard enchaîné is a 8-page newspaper. It does have a website, as pointed out by a previous comment, where it only shows “la une” (the first page) each week (but you can only read the headlines because the articles are too small). They indeed publish their financial statements each year but not in the last issue of the year; it is in the last issue of August.
There are other points in your note that I would disagree with, or at least won’t agree. For instance, you claim that Le Canard enchaîné publishes false informations. However, during all its existence (almost one century) it has very rarely lost trials for this particular reason.
I won’t elaborate on Hervé Gaymard’s scandal. I would just say that Le Canard enchaîné essentially investigates for moral and ethical reasons, not only in order to embarrass politicians. For me, it’s its main function.
Another thing: about the sources of Le Canard. You say their journalists just have to wait for disclosures to come. I think it’s wrong. For instance they are often the only newspaper to read official reports (which are publicly available), to find something interesting and to really investigate on this.
I hope my english is understable enough.
Au revoir.
— Jeddo · Feb 13, 11:41 PM · #
I don’t know of any other outlets worldwide that are even remotely comparable.
It’s admittedly a long time since I still had the kind of rudimentary knowledge of Russian that helped me understand at least what an article was about, if not much more than that — but ísn’t, or wasn’t, Sovershenno Sekretno somewhat comparable to Le Canard?
Again, it’s been a long time since I last looked into a copy, but some Googling suggests it might (have) be(en); see here and here, for example.
— nimh · Feb 14, 04:57 AM · #
PEG, this is an exceptional post.
— JA · Feb 14, 05:38 AM · #
Christopher M: Yes! “No website” and “placeholder website” are essentially the same thing from a media perspective, so I used one for the other.
Jeddo: Tout d’abord, merci pour ce commentaire.
You’re absolutely right. Le Canard is an 8-page newspaper. That was an oversight. 6-page seemed weird as I was writing it, but it’s what I remembered.
About publishing the financial statements: Ha. I was misled by the French Wikipédia.
Now, I’ve no doubt that journalists at Le Canard believe they are, indeed, acting for “moral and ethical reasons.” But that doesn’t mean they don’t have conflicts of interest and problems with unaccountability.
A former reporter at Le Canard who now works at Bakchich.Info claimed that he was put on a story on Nicolas Sarkozy’s law firm in 2007 and later pulled off the story because it was too late to print it to damage Sarkozy’s presidential campaign. Of course Le Canard denies this, so make of it what you will.
But a senior person at Le Canard told me that they refuse to break stories about personalities’ private life, including Mitterrand’s daughter, even though she was under government protection residing in a government apartment which made it a public matter, even though every other newspaper had the story but refused to break it because it was embargoed, all of this because “Le Canard s’arrête au seuil de la chambre.” Yet this same senior person told me that they broke the story about Cardinal Daniélou frequenting prostitutes because, and I quote, he was “a traditionalist” and “obstructing change in the Church”. So, at least in the past, Le Canard has employed a double standard.
And about Le Canard being the only newspaper that reads government reports: come on. :) Do you really think Le Canard has the manpower to comb through every never read report out of the gajillions that the French government prints? Who do you think tells them where to look in those reports? If you’re French and you follow politics you know that 99% of the government reports are never read by anyone. If you write one of those reports and you want it to get attention, wouldn’t you tell Le Canard where the juicy bit of the report is?
nimh: I have no idea! I will look into it.
JA: Thank you!
— PEG · Feb 14, 09:56 AM · #
«A former reporter at Le Canard who now works at Bakchich.Info claimed that (…)»
The story is much more complicated. The journalist (Nicolas Beau) explained that the journal had a source to protect. Moreover, he said that the redaction was “violently” against Nicolas Sarkozy’s election (He said that at @rrêt sur images). To my opinion, this breakdown would not have changed anything to the result of the election, that’s why they published it later. The reason why Nicolas Beau left Le Canard enchaîné is that he was not supported by its fellows (he said he had the support of the direction but not of the other journalists) for its inquiry about Chirac’s japanese bank account.
«And about Le Canard being the only newspaper that reads government reports: come on. :) Do you really think Le Canard has the manpower to comb through every never read report out of the gajillions that the French government prints? (…)»
You’re right. I think some people tell them what to read, and sometimes why. The idea was that this kind of report is often the starting point of investigation. The journalists have to check what sources bring to them. And I think they really do it. Hervé Liffran (one of the investigator of the journal) said for instance that he went to Haut-de-Seine archives (ok, it’s not so far from Paris ;-)) in order to read the cadastre. Anybody could do it since it’s public but nobody do it, except Le Canard’s journalists.
— Jeddo · Feb 15, 02:25 PM · #
You’re right, on both counts.
I wasn’t writing against Le Canard, and I’m not saying they do NO reporting whatsoever and NO fact-checking. They just do less of it than a newspaper that breaks so many stories normally would.
— PEG · Feb 15, 10:14 PM · #
The closest paper I can think to Le Canard is Private Eye in the UK. It’s far more satire based and far, far more likely to get sued for libel. It does publish lots of leaks and gossip about potential conflicts of interests and so on. Its stuff on local councils is especially good and, in my view, important.
Shaun
— Shaun · Feb 16, 03:28 AM · #