You might recall that I told you all a couple of months ago, during the French presidential election campaign, that Joshua Boswell's then-extant blog http://frenchelection2007.blogspot.com/ was great for getting a real sense of what was going on in La France.
The issues, the personalities, the hidden agendas of the people behind the curtain, what levers the unions were pulling on a particular day, plus the group that never matters in the U.S.: the self-proclaimed intellectuals. (And you know who you are!)
More often than not, I used Josh's blog to follow-up on the nightly campaign reports I watched on France 2's excellent news program 20 Heures, http://jt.france2.fr/20h/ , which I watched every night at 11:30 p.m. instead of ABC News Nightline, which I watch only intermittently these days.
For someone with a news junkie DNA like me, I'm fortunate to live in a part of South Florida where www.SCOLA.org telecasts on a local Miami-based low-power TV station, Channel 53, which airs TV news and cultural programming from all around the world, 24/7, via satellite directly from the originating stations/networks.
It's not a "must-carry" for Comcast, but is available to anyone who knows about it, and has either a rabbit ears antenna or a cable line to act like an antenna.
Video is usually okay but not great.
Usually I'd either watch 20 Heures from France 2 -or tape it and watch it later- when it comes on every night at 11:30 p.m., or the 10:30 a.m. encore the following morning.
On Saturday mornings, before I did any errands, I'd zip thru the tapes looking for anything good I might've missed, before throwing out the Post-Its and then put the tapes in my re-use pile.
They usually have an English language translation crawl below the screen that's usually pretty accurate, though during the run-up to the 2nd round, there were the occasional lapses.
I'd usually catch the mistakes when I was being careful in writing down facts that I either didn't know or hadn't read anywhere, or, in transcribing parts of speeches by Sarkozy, Royal, Fillon, et al to their devout supporters, esp. Sarkozy's zingers aimed at Royal and her supporters.
(Speaking of keeping your word, there this, just in from the Financial Times:
Sarkozy’s 100 steps to slimmer government
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b9ad8f52-a8ee-11dc-ad9e-0000779fd2ac.html )
Reading Josh, I was much better able to connect some of the subtle policy points that were sometimes lost on me, especially given the generally poor U.S. TV coverage of the election.
That tended to have the same p.o.v. or undercurrent to it regardless of the date or subject, a point often hammered home then by Matt Drudge on his syndicated Sunday night radio show: Ségolène Royal as a Hillary precursor.
(In the future, since I wrote down so much, I'll post a lot of the notes I took on Sarkozy's public policy pronouncements during the campaign, which I always found clear and persuasive.)
Josh's follow-up blog, http://frenchpolitique.blogspot.com/ continues his excellent work.
I think this particular recent post about Royal's new book proves it!
A week after the fact, you'd think this Royal story would have Elaine Sciolino's New York Times byline all over it, mais non. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/elaine_sciolino/index.html?inline=nyt-per
Besides bookmarking Josh's site, you might also want to consider adding the Times' own homepage for all things France:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/france/index.html
Without further ado, the aforementioned bit of delicious political dirt with context and commentary by Joshua Boswell
http://frenchpolitique.blogspot.com/2007/12/royals-christmas-present.html
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 Royal's Christmas Present
http://www.southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/
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