“The idea is to bypass the somewhat frozen tables provided for by the Élysée”. Our political journalist Florence Chédotal has this beautiful formula to summarize the journalistic stake on a presidential visit.
The visit of a President of the Republic is framed for several reasons. For the services of the Elysee, it is necessary to manage the image of the president, to organize the presence of several dozen journalists, all this with drastic security conditions.
After being duly accredited, our journalists began the day last Wednesday with a visit to the demining service and the search of their bags. “Everything is very framed, bordered,” says our agency manager in Moulins, Alexandre Chatenet. The different types of media are grouped together: televisions are as close as possible to the president like radios for example, which must capture sound and image.
Sometimes, the smallness of the place requires working in a “pool”: a few journalists are thus authorized to follow a sequence and they then share quotes, photos or videos with the rest of the press. The media, national or local, then work as a team and a WhatsApp thread connects everyone.
Pool, file WhatsApp …
But with Emmanuel Macron, there was also an element of improvisation. The walkabout at the exit of the town hall of Moulins, the one organized in Vichy after the moments of meditation were not planned for so long. The visit to the parents of Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded in the Paris region by a terrorist, was not on the program either. And for obvious security reasons, journalists were asked not to disclose it until after it took place.
The arrival of the Klarsfeld couple was whispered by elected officials to our journalists since the morning, it was formalized by the Elysee in the afternoon. No interview was allowed and this is where our deputy manager in Vichy, Matthieu Perrinaud, decided to leave the framework, by handing the microphone to Serge Klarsfeld to give more depth to this historic moment. “It’s interesting to live professionally, but it’s very frustrating,” says Matthieu Perrinaud. Like this interview with the president that we waited all day without it taking place.
Julien Bonnefoy (mediator of La Montagne)
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