It is very interesting to see how poor the coverage of NSA tech affair displays the lame skills of high profile french newspapers such as LeMonde and L’Express. It is very telling to see the kind of error these publication do. A few examples:
… récupérer les rapports d’erreur envoyés par **l’opérateur de système** Windows aux ingénieurs de Microsoft …
In this case, poor translation of Operating System into System Operator shows that the journalist at Le Monde who wrote this are totally foreign to the technology world. It’s not that Le Monde is devoid of good technology skills in its journalist crew, as for example Jean Marc Manach from Le Monde Blog displays excellent track record in the tech world. So why these obvious mistakes?
For l’Express
dans le cadre de la surveillance de l’opérateur belge Belgacom, lors de révélations datant du mois de septembre. Le quotidien belge Standaard expliquait alors que l’opérateur avait décelé une intrusion “sophistiquée” au sein de sa filiale BCIS, fournisseur en gros de lignes téléphoniques
There, it’s pure bad journalism practice where journalism skills seem low: low-details and they didn’t even spell right the hacked Belgacom’s subsidiary right as BCIS instead of BICS.
We can hope that these publication upgrade their level, but one cannot expect articles to be good if the staff does not have a taste for these subjects. And it seems to have been the case for a long time.
Moreover, one can even question the low interest and activity of these high profile french newspapers in regard with Snowden and NSA affair. How many articles published in french about this? This story is one of the most historic and important disclosure since Wikileaks and french newspaper don’t display the same kind of interest or professionalism as Washington Post, The Guardian or Der Spiegel do.
These publication will probably have to justify to their readership their true independence in front of conflictual and non-consensual subjects.