Word: servane
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...Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the appearance of a new newsmagazine was a Gaullist plot against his successful anti-regime weekly L'Express. "The government tried to muzzle me through Le Point," the publisher-politician-author says of his rival, "and it hasn't worked out. We have won the battle." To Claude Imbert, Le Point's editor and Servan-Schreiber's former colleague, the aim is to give French readers a taste of journalism free of ideology, an antidote to the "current breed of French intellectuals in the press and elsewhere, with their leftist dogmas...
...months that followed, editorial complaints about the publisher's "politicization" of L'Express swelled into a full-scale office revolt; a showdown between Servan-Schreiber and his staff in mid-1971 resulted in the mass resignation of the magazine's senior editorial staff. Nine of the former L'Express men began to meet regularly to plan a new magazine to compete with their former employer...
Eventually the group presented its concept to Nora, general director of Librairie Hachette, a giant firm that owns 50 publications. The company also has links with the reigning Gaullist Party. Ironically, Nora himself was one of Servan-Schreiber's closest associates during the launching of L'Express in 1953, but the friendship iced over after Nora accepted a government post. The bad blood between the two added spice to Hachette's decision to publish Le Point. "Between such good friends gone wrong," says one top Paris journalist, "there can be nothing but cadavers...
Hachette launched a $2,000,000 promotion campaign, ridiculing French journalistic "conformity" and promising Le Point's independence of everybody, including owners-a slap at Servan-Schreiber's control of L'Express. Stung by Servan-Schreiber's charge that Hachette would use Le Point to parrot the government line, Publisher Olivier Chevrillon and Editor Imbert argued that since Servan-Schreiber's entry into partisan politics, "L'Express has ceased to be a true newsmagazine." Le Point, they promised, would be objective...
Some think that salvation lies elsewhere. "The government is set upon either controlling or destroying the press," declares Journalist-Politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, general director of the weekly L'Express. Government control of broadcasting, says J.J.-S.S., is "one of the most cancerous traits of French society." He argues that publishers should branch out into profitable fields unrelated to journalism. If they cannot, the long-term outlook is for still fewer Paris papers...