Benefiting from more than 35 years of professional experience, Corinne Lalo is an investigative journalist, a major reporter for the written press, radio and television (mainly at TF1) and a specialist in environmental and health issues. She has worked in particular on major public health scandals (contaminated blood, hepatitis B vaccine, H1N1 flu, Mediator). In this “Essential interview“, she analyzes the evolution of journalism throughout her career and draws up an unequivocal assessment: “a constant deterioration of the freedom to inform”. From now on, the objective of the media is to make sure that the population no longer hears “ only one sound of a bell” instead of exposing different points of view on a controversy in order to help the French to form their own opinion. But, she points out, “to remove the contradiction is to take for a speech” : a discourse that corresponds to that of the government, which itself ensures the defense of private interests.
For Corinne Lalo, the information situation today is comparable to that which existed within the Soviet Union. Those who opposed the single speech of the Communist Party were called “dissidents” and then sent to camps. In 2022, in France, as elsewhere in the West, those who oppose the official word are treated as “conspirators”, then ostracized from society.
The result today: the French are under-informed, which makes it easier to misinform them, explains the journalist. A state of affairs also made possible by the drop in level within less pluralistic editorial staff, made up of journalists who are “squeezed like lemons” to produce content and “who no longer have the notion of history”. In support of her statements, she stresses that if journalists did research, they would be aware that France had already devised, to prepare the response to a possible pandemic, action plans in which, for example, it is provided that only sick people should self-isolate, not healthy people.
The woman reporter also recalls that she may have been confronted with several State lies during her career, in particular that on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a case during which the French government had assured that the radioactive cloud n hadn’t passed over France. If it is now universally recognized that the executive had lied, Corinne Lalo regrets that today, “Young people don’t want to believe that the state can lie”.
Moreover, the Covid-19 crisis, she insists, is a repetition of the scenario played out during the H1-N1 flu. A crisis that had resulted in a bitter failure of vaccination against the disease. Questioned by a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into excessive orders for vaccines, Roselyne Bachelot, then Minister of Health, had then expressed two regrets: not having scared the French enough and not having locked the Internet enough, relates Corinne Lalo. This is why during the Covid crisis, we face “organized and uninhibited censorship, with the help of fact-checkers”she points out.