journalism and protocol

 
I was talking to a friend the other day, and she said something that opened my mind. She was talking about a meeting she had gone to, and remarked that one of her colleagues there was talking to everyone in a tone that was out of protocol. It hit me then, this thing I have been puzzling over. The style of Le Monde.
The lead articles on politics in Le Monde, even more than the political reporting in the New York Times, have a curious tone. I guess it is the tone of the servant who is following the rules of protocol at the court. In such ceremonies, as we know from countless movies, there is not much room for maneuver. The names and titles on the list must be read out distinctly and smoothly. They are communication of a sort, but to who? Sometimes to the king, or the master of the revels, and sometimes to the assorted guests. But mostly, these people know each others titles and names.
Here, communication is subsumed in pomp. It is just this surplus of information that is the point. Just as the sorting procedure that organizes the names is the point. The guests and the royals are not going to listen to the names and the titles: they are listening to the tone, the music. It is the music of deference and hierarchy.
This is exactly the music of Le Monde’s lead articles about President Macron.
Here’s the entry on protocol on  Brewer’s Phrase and Fable”
“Protocol (pro' t5 kol). The first rough draft or original copy of a dispatch, which is to form the basis of a treaty; from Gr. proto-koleon, a sheet glued to the front of a manuscript, or to the case containing it, and bearing an abstract of the contents and purport. Also the ceremonial procedure used in affairs of diplomacy or on state occasions.”
There’s an interesting movement between, on the one hand, the rough draft as a supplement, and the procedure as a ceremony. Protocol survived the French revolutions, the Republics, Vichy, DeGaulle, 1968, the sexual revolution, Mitterand and the neoliberal turn. The political reporting in Le Monde is much like the “echoes” social columns that used to appear in all the Paris newspapers, reporting this or that aristocrat’s or plutocrat’s ball. It fills a space in which the uninvited reader is definitely an intruder, and the tone is such that the reader should be happy just to have gawking rights.
Protocol in the U.S. is of a more rough and tumble variety, but in D.C. society it has definitely formed its own music, its own inner and outer circles.
Macron, unlike other recent French Presidents, is a highly protocol oriented boy-man. He’s been in this business since he was weaned on the silver spoon – a much different background than, say, Sarkozy’s. In this way, as in so many others, he is most like the despicable Giscard D’Estaing. This comfort with protocol is something that Le Monde’s writers are ultra down with.
Take, for instance, the big story about the leg of Macron’s “pacification” tour in Ganges. Elsewhere in the world, on Twitter and TV, the big story was about that antithesis of protocol, the banging pot. The prefect of Ganges had forbidden “l’usage des instruments sonores portatifs” – the kind of interesting detail that historians of the micro-history school die for. In Le Monde, though, under the headline MACRON AUGMENT LES PROFESSORS ET LES CRISPE – the kind of nudgework that Macronites and Le Monde’s editorialists love – the first paragraph is like unto a court announcement.
For his second trip [deuxieme deplacement] after the promulgatin of the very contested reform of retirements, Emmanuel Macron chose to speak of education. This was done in the middle of a little circle of fifteen professors, students and parents, sitting the sunny courtyard of a rural Herault establishment, the college Louise-Michel de Gange, where he himself put an end to the suspense on the promised measures on wages for teachers.|
The exact number of people in a circle about the President, who is “putting an end to the suspense” regarding the compensation of teachers, is an almost too perfect figure of court society and reporting. “Put an end” to whose suspense? Not really anybody’s. Neither the fifteen people, nor the reporter, nor the reader are in suspense over the compensation proposed, as this has long been batted around. The professors are on edge – crisper – because the proposal is actually Sarkozy’s work more and make more in the realm of the sadly underinvested realm of public education. However, the subject matter here is of less importance than the style of announcing and describing what the case is.
I am not a man  on whom protocol sits very well. I like it sometimes, but I find it boring most of the time, and I find it an absurd approach to what is happening in France at the moment. However, day after day Le Monde plays the role of the valet leading out the order of the dances and putting an end to the suspense: for tonight’s fete, his highness has ordered a waltz!
Even twitter is better than this.