The Map on the Wall: A Colonial Hangover
Step into most French newsrooms and you’ll trip over a mental map of the Middle East that was sketched at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, tidied up at Sèvres in 1920, and never seriously redrawn. The region still gets talked about as a collection of zones d’influence—spheres where French interests once held sway and where, supposedly, French journalists still have a natural right to explain things to everyone else. Lebanon isn’t a country so much as a French emotional territory. Syria is a failed protectorate. The Maghreb is a troubled extension of the métropole. And the Gulf? The Gulf is a bank with sand.
This cartographic nostalgia shapes coverage in ways newsrooms rarely admit to themselves. When a French correspondent gets sent to Beirut, they land with a pre-written script: sectarian balance, Francophone elites, a Mediterranean exception to Arab chaos. The story is half-filed before the wheels hit the tarmac. What gets lost is the actual Lebanon—the one where sectarianism isn’t some quaint cultural trait but a power-distribution system designed by French mandatory authorities, where the Francophone elite is a shrinking, deeply contested class, and where that Mediterranean identity is as much a real-estate developer’s marketing slogan as a lived reality for most people.
This isn’t about individual journalists. Plenty of them are diligent, linguistically capable, genuinely curious. The trouble is structural. It sits in the editorial assumptions that decide which stories get commissioned, which angles count as legitimate, and which voices are authorised to speak. A French foreign editor once told me, with no apparent irony, that the paper preferred to cover Iraq through its Baghdad bureau rather than relying on Iraqi journalists because “we need someone who understands the French reader.” The implication hung in the air: an Iraqi journalist might know Iraq, but they don’t know how to make Iraq digestible for a French audience. The French reader’s comfort is the organising principle. The region’s reality comes second.
The Tyranny of the Expert
French television and radio have a particular addiction to a figure I call l’expert omniprésent—the omnipresent expert. Usually a white French man in his sixties, a former diplomat or a Sciences Po academic, wheeled out for every crisis from Marrakech to Muscat. He speaks in polished paragraphs, never hesitates, and has a gift for making the incomprehensible sound orderly. He’s the reason your grandmother thinks she understands the Yemeni civil war after a three-minute segment on France 24.
The problem isn’t that these experts lack knowledge. Many have spent decades working on the region. The problem is the epistemological framework they drag along with them. It’s a framework built on state-to-state relations, on the primacy of regime stability, on the idea that the region’s peoples are essentially passive recipients of great-power decisions. When the Arab uprisings erupted in 2011, this framework collapsed spectacularly. French media spent months fumbling for a language to describe what was happening. The default vocabulary was printemps arabe—Arab Spring—a term borrowed from the 1848 revolutions in Europe, as if the only way to make Arab popular movements legible was to dress them in European historical costume.
What was missing was any sustained attention to the internal dynamics of Arab societies: the labour movements, the feminist organising, the decade of anti-war activism that had prepared the ground for 2011. French audiences were told about Facebook and Twitter, about Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, about the “contagion” of protest. But they were rarely told about the Tunisian General Labour Union’s role, about the lawyers’ collectives in Egypt, about the years of sit-ins and strikes in Bahrain. These weren’t telegenic. They didn’t fit the narrative of spontaneous digital revolution. So they were largely ignored.
The expert system also creates a self-reinforcing loop. The same dozen names appear across all major outlets because they’re known quantities, because they speak in soundbites, because they never challenge the editorial line too sharply. Dissenting voices—particularly Arab, Kurdish, Iranian, or Turkish scholars who might bring a different analytical tradition—are rarely invited. When they are, they’re often introduced with a faintly exoticising frame: “a perspective from the ground,” “a voice from the region.” The implication is that their knowledge is raw material, unprocessed, in need of refinement by the French expert who follows them.
The Israel-Palestine Exception
No subject reveals the structural biases of French media more starkly than Israel-Palestine. Here, the usual rules of coverage get suspended. The careful contextualisation demanded of other conflicts—the historical deep dives, the sociological nuance, the attention to power asymmetries—is replaced by a flat, ahistorical language of “two sides” and “cycle of violence.” The occupation becomes a backdrop, not a structure. Palestinian resistance is framed as a security problem for Israel, not as a response to a fifty-six-year military occupation, settlement expansion, and the systematic denial of self-determination.
This isn’t simply a matter of pro-Israel bias, though that exists. It’s something more subtle: a profound discomfort with the Palestinian narrative because it disturbs French certainties about the Republic, about secularism, about the proper boundaries between religion and politics. Palestine reminds France of its own unresolved colonial past, of Algeria, of the unresolved place of Muslims and Arabs within the national story. It’s easier to treat the conflict as a tragic, endless feud between two equal parties than to acknowledge that it’s a struggle between an occupier and an occupied, a nuclear-armed state and a stateless people. The latter framing would require French media to take a position, and taking a position is seen as unjournalistic. But neutrality in the face of structural violence is itself a position—one that sides with the status quo.
There are exceptions. Le Monde diplomatique has consistently published rigorous, historically grounded analysis of Palestine. Orient XXI, a digital publication founded by journalists who felt the mainstream was failing the region, has produced some of the best French-language reporting on the Middle East in recent years. But these are niche outlets. The mass-audience broadcasters and daily newspapers remain trapped in a framework that treats Palestinian suffering as a regrettable, slightly embarrassing fact that must be balanced against Israeli security concerns. The result is coverage that is technically factual but structurally dishonest.
The Language Problem: When Words Become Walls
French is a language that loves abstraction. It’s the tongue of Descartes, of the Académie, of the dissertation. This can be a strength in philosophy. In journalism, it often becomes a mechanism for distancing. The Middle East is described in French media with a vocabulary that is strikingly bloodless. People aren’t killed; they “perish in violence.” Homes aren’t demolished; they’re “subject to urban restructuring.” Children aren’t traumatised; they’re “exposed to difficult contexts.” The language wraps itself around the reality like gauze, softening the edges, making the unbearable sound merely unfortunate.
This isn’t accidental. It reflects a deeper discomfort with the raw, the emotional, the explicitly political. French journalism has a tradition of hauteur—a certain elevated distance from its subject. In domestic politics, this can produce elegant, analytical coverage. Applied to the Middle East, it produces a kind of verbal anaesthesia. The reader is informed but not moved. The facts are transmitted but the moral weight of those facts is carefully filtered out.
There’s also a more specific linguistic problem. French media rely heavily on translation from Arabic, but the translation is often done by people who are linguistically competent but culturally distant from the source material. Slogans chanted at protests are rendered literally, losing their rhythm, their historical echoes, their poetic force. A phrase like “al-sha‘b yurid isqat al-nizam” becomes “the people want the fall of the regime”—accurate, but stripped of the percussive, mobilising power it has in Arabic. The French reader gets the information but not the feeling. And in the Middle East, feeling is information.
The Maghreb Blind Spot
France’s relationship with the Maghreb is intimate, painful, and deeply repressed. Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia aren’t foreign countries in the French imagination; they’re extensions of a French domestic space that many would prefer to forget. This produces a peculiar kind of coverage. Maghreb stories are often treated as French stories—about immigration, about Islam in France, about the legacy of colonialism—rather than as stories about sovereign nations with their own histories, debates, and futures.
When Algeria erupts in protest, as it did with the Hirak movement in 2019, French media scramble to find the French angle. How will this affect migration? What does it mean for Franco-Algerian relations? Is there a risk of Islamist takeover? The questions are almost never: What do Algerians want? What is the history of authoritarian rule in Algeria? How have Algerian civil society and labour movements sustained themselves through decades of repression? The Hirak was one of the most remarkable popular movements of the twenty-first century—peaceful, persistent, cross-class, cross-generational—and yet French coverage reduced it to a set of anxieties about France.
This isn’t just parochialism. It’s a form of epistemological colonialism. The Maghreb is only interesting to the extent that it affects France. Its internal dynamics are secondary. Its people aren’t subjects of their own history but objects of French concern. This is the unspoken assumption that structures so much of the coverage, and it’s rarely challenged because the newsrooms themselves are staffed by people who, however well-intentioned, have internalised this hierarchy of relevance.
The Gulf: Money, Sand, and Nothing Else
If the Maghreb is covered as a French problem, the Gulf is covered as a non-problem. It’s the region French media don’t know what to do with. The standard frame is wealth and opacity: oil money, luxury shopping, falconry, and majlis politics. The Gulf is a cartoon. Saudi Arabia is a theocracy that happens to have oil. The UAE is a shopping mall with an air force. Qatar is Al Jazeera and the World Cup. This isn’t entirely false, but it’s so thin as to be meaningless.
What’s missing is any serious engagement with the Gulf as a site of intense social transformation. The Gulf states are undergoing changes that are, in their own way, as dramatic as anything in the Arab uprisings: the restructuring of citizenship, the renegotiation of gender roles, the emergence of new forms of public culture, the tensions between rentier economics and post-oil futures. French media cover none of this. They cover arms sales and diplomatic mediation. They cover the PSG-Qatar connection. They don’t cover the Kuwaiti women who have been fighting for political rights for decades, or the Saudi novelists who are reimagining their society from within, or the migrant workers whose labour makes the Gulf possible and whose lives are systematically erased from the official image.
This erasure isn’t unique to French media, but it takes a particular French form. The Gulf is treated with a mixture of disdain and avarice—disdain for its supposed cultural vacuity, avarice for its investment capital and arms contracts. The coverage reflects the policy: France wants Gulf money and Gulf weapons sales, but it doesn’t want to think too hard about where that money comes from or what those weapons do. Journalism follows the flag, and the flag follows the contract.
When the Region Speaks, Who Listens?
Perhaps the most telling indicator of French media’s relationship with the Middle East is the question of sources. Who gets quoted? Who gets interviewed? Who is granted the authority to explain their own society? A content analysis of major French outlets over the past five years would likely reveal a striking pattern: the majority of quoted sources on Middle Eastern topics aren’t Middle Eastern. They’re French officials, French academics, French NGO workers, or—in a pinch—English-speaking analysts from American or British think tanks. The Arab, the Kurd, the Iranian, the Turk: they appear as vox populi, as the voice of the street, as the emotional colour. They’re rarely the analytical voice.
This isn’t a problem of language ability. Many Middle Eastern intellectuals speak and write fluent French. It’s a problem of legitimacy. The French media system doesn’t fully recognise the intellectual authority of people from the region to speak about their own societies in analytical terms. They’re treated as witnesses, not as thinkers. Their role is to provide testimony, not theory. Theory is the province of the French expert, who can place the testimony in its proper context and extract its universal significance.
This division of labour is so deeply embedded that it’s almost invisible to those who practice it. But its effects are profound. It means that French audiences rarely encounter Middle Eastern voices as intellectual equals. It means that the conceptual frameworks used to understand the region are almost entirely generated outside it. It means that the Middle East is perpetually an object of knowledge, never a source of it.
FAQ
Why does French media coverage of the Middle East often feel disconnected from reality?
French media tends to view the Middle East through a lens shaped by colonial history and domestic political concerns. The region is often framed in terms of its relationship to France—as a former mandate, a source of immigration, or a security concern—rather than on its own terms. This produces coverage that prioritises French interests and French analytical traditions over the lived realities and intellectual perspectives of people in the region. Additionally, the reliance on a narrow pool of French experts and the use of abstract, distancing language further disconnects the coverage from the complex, often harsh realities on the ground.
How does French media’s coverage of Israel-Palestine differ from other conflicts?
Coverage of Israel-Palestine in mainstream French media often avoids the structural framing that is applied to other conflicts. Instead of clearly identifying an occupation and the power imbalance between a nuclear-armed state and a stateless population, the conflict is frequently presented as a symmetrical “cycle of violence” between two equal parties. This approach stems from a discomfort with the Palestinian narrative, which challenges French republican ideals and evokes uncomfortable parallels with France’s own colonial history, particularly in Algeria. As a result, the coverage tends to neutralise the moral dimensions of the conflict, presenting it as a tragic but insoluble feud rather than a struggle against military occupation and dispossession.
How does the French media’s treatment of the Maghreb differ from its coverage of the Gulf?
The Maghreb is covered primarily through the lens of its relationship to France—immigration, Islam in France, and the legacy of colonialism. The internal politics, social movements, and cultural developments of Maghreb countries are often secondary to their perceived impact on French society. In contrast, the Gulf is treated with a mixture of disdain and avarice: it is seen as a region of extreme wealth and cultural vacuity, interesting mainly for its investment capital, arms contracts, and diplomatic mediation. The profound social transformations occurring in Gulf societies—changes in citizenship, gender roles, and post-oil economic planning—are largely ignored. Both approaches fail to treat these regions as complex societies with their own histories and futures.
What can be done to improve French media coverage of the Middle East?
Improvement requires structural changes, not just individual effort. Newsrooms need to diversify their pool of experts and analysts, actively seeking out scholars and journalists from the region who can bring different analytical traditions and lived experience. Editorial frameworks must be critically examined to identify and challenge the colonial and domestic-political biases that shape story selection and framing. Language should be more direct and less abstract, conveying the moral weight of events rather than anaesthetising them. Finally, coverage should treat Middle Eastern societies as subjects of their own history, with internal dynamics that are interesting and important in their own right, not merely as objects of French concern or curiosity.