French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

Something really scary in France right now is that you can see really clearly how most mainstream media are used for propaganda.

Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies supporting him. It's hard to imagine but non stop. You have everyday interviews of his family saying that it is an injustice, that he did nothing, that the judgement was rigged, that he was a great men that served France and so should not be treated like everyone else. Article about how sad the poor family is. Number of articles repeating friends of him verbatim s that the judgement was fake.

Almost none speaking about the facts, the grounds for his sentence, the big number of other trials against him that are running. And also the other definitive convictions he got. Like for attempting to bribe a head prosecutor to get insider info about his case. Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...

But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.

> Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies supporting him.

How much of this is driven by contrarian and counter-cyclical reporting?

I’m not familiar with French media, but I see the same pattern in every country where I’ve kept up with the news: Media starts being favorable to a topic when it’s up and coming, switching to being highly critical when that topic becomes mainstream, then reverts again to exploring the positives when the topic falls out of favor.

You see it even with people like Elizabeth Holmes. News stories about her fraud were everywhere until she had to go to jail, but now the news has swung to humanizing her, claiming her sentencing was excessive, focusing on the angle of a mother separated from her children, and confusingly ignoring her fraud at all.

It’s all designed to be counter-narrative and rise waves of controversy. The more controversial, the more shares and views.

Thank you so much for this comment - you've put a name ("contrarian and counter-cyclical reporting") on a phenomenon that I've observed a lot and is one of the main reasons I don't consume the media anymore.

The craziest example for me was NYC congestion pricing. When it was about to happen, all the reporting was about all of the downsides of the tolls starting. A week after the New York Governor "indefinitely paused" congestion pricing, the reporting was all about the downsides of the tolls not starting.

So the media intentionally stirs controversy and they aren't even getting paid to do it by hostile states or the ultra-wealthy? There really is no hope is there.

The media relies first and foremost on advertising revenue, which depends on ratings or viewership metrics, which become the goal. The more viewers you get, the more expensive advertising slots become: the point stops being to report the facts and starts being to engage the audience at an emotional level, so that they come back for more.