Journalist sanctioned for revealing judges indulging in disorderly conduct.
PARIS. The French media usually have a soft spot for whistleblowers, people who reveal matters that the public is not supposed know about. Among recently celebrated leakers are the American soldier Bradley Manning who passed secret military information to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and now Edward Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong after leaking information on American surveillance.
Not included in this celebrated group is French television journalist Clément Weill-Raynal, who works for the television station France 3. When on assignment to the offices of the Syndicat de la Magistrature, a left-leaning union of judges, a couple of weeks ago, he noticed that the judges had posted pictures of people they disliked on a huge bulletin board – labeled the Mur des cons, the Wall of Scumbags – complete with hostile graffiti against said scumbags.
The female president of the union indicated that the journalists must not film the bulletin board. Weill-Raynal nevertheless filmed the wall with his cell phone.
Days later and by a circuitous route the news of the Wall of Scumbags broke on the Atlantico website and from there it splashed all over the mainstream media. The result was indignation – not at the fact that judges kept a list of enemies, but against Weill-Raynal, who had “illegally” filmed the evidence.
Before the identity of the culprit was revealed, the left-leaning daily Libération had this to say: “it shows how news can be twisted for political purposes.” One of Weill-Raynal’s colleagues noted: “his right wing commitment is no secret.” Others remarked that he was controversial because he “’led the campaign against Charles Enderlin,’ accused of faking images in a report on the death of a Palestinian child in 2000.” Dispatch International wrote about this so-called al-Dura affair on January 31 and May 29.