Word: press
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...profit out of the newspaper business. Ten years ago an eight-page paper sold for half a franc; today a four-pager costs 5 francs. And newsprint has gone from 2,500 francs a ton in 1939 ($62.76) to 35,000 ($114.63). Furthermore, the sins of the prewar press had been visited on the postwar press...
...Venal. By U.S. standards, French journalism has always been nonobjective, cynical and, before the war, appallingly venal. Several influential national dailies (la grande presse) were potent enough to topple governments. But the French coined the ugly term la presse pourrie ("rotten press") for those that sold out to big business or to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Balkan countries...
Most of the prewar press worked for the Nazis during the occupation. When they fled, the 1,000 "tainted" publications were seized and their sullied titles banned. Today no Paris paper may bear the name of Le Matin, Le Petit Parisien, Le Temps, L'Oeuvre or Paris-Soir, among others. Some 300 publishers have still to stand trial...
...wobbly French press is no longer either powerful or corrupt. No foreign power can plant a campaign, for a price, in a French paper-except, of course, in L'Humanite, which sometimes reads as if it were edited in the Kremlin. Nor can government ministers phone editors, as they did before the war, and tell them what to print and what to kill...
White-haired Georges Cogniot, editor in chief of L'Humanite (circ. 450,000), insists that "the press is now venal in a different way from before the war. It still gets money from [big business] trusts, publicity or the government's secret funds." But the charge can neither be proved nor disproved. The government allots newsprint, pegs its price, and subsidizes the news service A.F.P. (which could not exist otherwise), but expression is free...