As I reported last week, Daniel Dayan and I had a nice lunch in Paris on the terrace of a little restaurant at the Palais Royal. He ate blood sausage. My wife, Naomi, and I had couscous with chicken. I followed Daniel’s recommendation and ordered mine with olives, a dish that was his grandmother’s specialty back in Morocco. We discussed what proved to be the theme of last week, looking at North Africa and the Middle East from the point of view of Europe. But of course, we couldn’t and didn’t ignore the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, then raging in Paris. The following evening, he extended his side of the conversation in a crisp essay, which we posted on Monday. Here I continue my side of the conversation.

My first response came in the form of an email I wrote him upon receiving his piece:

I don’t agree with you on all points, centered on two issues: the way the distinction between private and public moves (the most general issue), and how the presumption of innocence necessarily varies from one institutional sphere to the next, from the judiciary to the police to the press, for example. Consider the case of a child molester and how the presumption is enacted or not by different people placed differently in the society. This is an empirical and normative issue. More soon. Again it was great seeing you and great receiving the post.

In the case of a child molester, the police look for a suspect and attempt to confirm guilt, while in court there must be a presumption of innocence. Before, during and after a trial, the press and the general public judges, independently of formal legalities, and explores whether they think justice is done by the police and the courts, sometimes in a sensational way. The spheres of public activity and the press are different from the professional activities of the police and the courts. And quite clearly, when the issue is child molestation, the public and the press are predisposed, often without regard to the solidity of the evidence, to believe the police, given the nature of the crime and the revulsion it elicits. They presume guilt.

Nonetheless with other sorts of offenses, ones concerning political or moral position, this often is not the case. In the U.S., Democrats probably presume Republican rascals are guilty, while Republicans presume the guilt of Democratic rascals. Partisanship colors perception, no doubt and this sort of partisan perception certainly was going on in the DSK affair.

Dayan worries, understandably, that the spectacle of guilt and dislodging of the powerful may overwhelm justice. He takes this to be the point of the philosopher and former minister Luc Ferry’s media performance, during which he denounced the press’ failure to report an unnamed former minister’s pedophilia in Morocco at an unspecified time. So outrageous was the performance that Dayan speculates it must have been “a demonstration by a philosopher of the way the media routinely takes short-cuts and obstructs the process of justice.”

Dayan believes that the French media have been perniciously operating, presuming guilt instead of innocence in the DSK affair. Further, he believes that the critical self-reflection in the French media about their failure to report Strauss-Kahn’s past transgressions overlooks the necessity of drawing a strong distinction between public and private matters. This is where my dear friend and I have a fundamental theoretical disagreement.

To use the theory of Eviatar Zerubavel, while Dayan believes that there needs to be a clear and strong distinction between public and private concerns, I believe the distinction is fuzzy and that it’s good that it is. However, we agree that the distinction between public and private has to be drawn. Thus Daniel (WikiLeaks and the Politics of Gestures and Political Leadership and Hostile Visibility) and I (WikiLeaks Front Stage/Back Stage) fundamentally agree that WikiLeaks’ general release of secret diplomatic exchanges potentially undermined diplomacy, which is one of the fundamental alternatives to war in international relations. It is not the specific revelations that concern me. It is the general principle that openness is more desirable than secrecy. Sometimes secrets are necessary in order to get on with proper private and public concerns, e.g. both love and the alternatives to war. When some things are shown, they disappear. As Hannah Arendt explored in The Human Condition, when love is openly and publicly displayed, it is no longer intimate, no longer love.

But surely, this disappearance is not always a loss. Public inspection makes it clear when romance, seduction, and eroticism end and sexual aggression and even rape begin. Now in France people are reporting they knew or at least suspected, for a long time, with considerable evidence, that Strauss-Kahn was not a womanizer but a sexual predator. Media attention to such matters would have made that clear. Reporting on such matters may have been indiscreet. But in this case indiscretion would have been a public virtue. The sexual peccadilloes of public figures shouldn’t matter, until they should, and the media clumsily should work with this. More on this next week, with reflections on the foolishness of Anthony Weiner.

A final note on the Week in Review: In the past months I have used the Week in Review to show how the various posts at DC during the week relate and highlight an important public issue or theoretical point. I will continue to occasionally make such posts. But I will also use the platform, as I did today, to engage a specific post, or to address an issue that occurred in the past week that we have not addressed here. That said, in the posts this week, we saw how the elections in Peru show how institutionalized democracy matters. Memorial tattoos show how marked skins beyond the workings of official institutions preserve memory for and of those involved in war, and as Alissa’s moving reply to the post demonstrates, they can also inspire the reflections of those beyond the immediately involved. Of course, this depends on the mediation of the photographer, Mary Beth Heffernan, and the report and reflections of the sociologist, Michael Corey. What we do to make the world a bit more tolerable for a small circle can have large effects beyond our circle, as Vince Carducci’s review of Grace Lee Boggs’ latest book reveals. For more on that theme take a look at the video of Immanuel Wallerstein and Grace Lee Boggs in conversation at the 2010 US Social Forum embedded in the post.

In France, is Dominique Strauss-Kahn “presumed innocent” until proven guilty? In fact, he is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Or worse, he is presumed guilty, until confirmed guilty since the French media usually expect courts to confirm their own “enlightened” judgment and can be extraordinarily vindictive when they don’t. Thus, a petition signed by thousands of journalists “condemning” the court that condemned the national French TV Channel Antenne II for broadcasting unsubstantiated allegations. This post is about the media treatment of the presumption of innocence.

Consider a driver who deliberately speeds and runs over a policeman in front of a crowd of witnesses in order to avoid being checked at a road block. The driver is described in the news as the “presumed” author of the policeman’s coma. The word “presumed” here is a language automatism, an adornment, a legal curlicue. There is not a shadow of a doubt that this driver‘s car hit the policeman. No matter how grotesque, the word “presumed” tends to be repeated in such situations “ad nauseaum.”

With DSK, we are in a situation where the presumption of innocence matters because the facts are not established. Despite various forms of lip service, this presumption is resolutely trampled. In a recent talk show about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, stand-up comedian Michel Boujenah expressed uneasiness about the fact that most of the journalists around him started from the premise that DSK was guilty. He reminded them that DSK had to be considered innocent until proven guilty. “Yes, yes,” said the journalists. Then they went on with their debate. To them, the presumption of innocence was an annoying contrivance, something akin to the presence of a vocal anti-racist at certain dinner parties; a presence that proves annoying since it prevents guests from cracking race jokes. The stand-up comedian reiterated his remark. He was definitely spoiling the fun. “OK,” replied one journalist, just add an “if” to everything I say. Just put my words in the conditional!” Then he resumed the discussion as if the guilt of DSK was beyond any doubt.

Ferry’s bomb

Such a contempt for the presumption of innocence serves as a background for a “public-sphere-bomb” that has just been thrown in the ongoing debate about Dominique Strauss-Kahn by the philosopher and former Minister of Education Luc Ferry.

In another talk-show watched by millions, Luc Ferry denounced a striking example of the silence observed by the French media when it comes to high political personnel, a silence that is now fashionably described as akin to Omertà, Ferry noted that no French newspaper had reported on the fact that one former French minister had been caught with young boys in a pedophilic party in Marrakesh, Morocco. Ferry added he had no proof of what he asserted. He also stated that had learned of such a scandal from a reliable source, a top-level government member whose name he did not provide.

The first and obvious response to this statement consists in seeing Ferry’s disclosure as detestable. Ferry might have spoken out of personal antagonism, out of spite, or as a form of revenge. Or, in compliance with the current mood among the members of the French journalistic establishment, Ferry would be combating the risk of Omertà by starting an inquisitorial process through an act of denunciation. If such a scenario were correct, I would unhesitatingly condemn Ferry. I know that any accused former minister could be identified in a matter of minutes. I also know that his life would be destroyed, whether the allegation is true or false. Submitted to an almost unanimous barrage of critiques, Ferry would also be required to justify his assertions in court.

Yet, this scenario does not seem convincing to me. Not only would I like to give the philosopher the benefit of the doubt, but, I have serious doubts about the meaning of his disclosure. Ferry’s carefully worded disclosure looks as if it had been supervised by a team of lawyers. Ferry does not give a name for the supposed pedophile. The high official he describes as his source remains anonymous. He insists that he has no evidence and no proof of what happened in Marrakesh. In other terms, Luc Ferry has entirely staged his public appearance as that of a rumor-mongerer. No name, no source, no proof. What game is he playing?

A fiction and a breakfast

I propose that Ferry’s “disclosure” could be a pedagogical exercise: a demonstration by a philosopher of the way the media routinely takes short-cuts and obstructs the process of justice. Ferry provides all the elements of a tragically recurring scenario. Here is a rumor without proof; a source that is not disclosed, an innuendo that precludes any possibility of refutation. In a way, Ferry’s charade expresses in a polemical form the uneasiness of the stand-up comedian.

Of course, this is my reading of Ferry’s gesture. Ferry has become a character in a story of fiction I am making up. But perhaps my fiction is not so far-fetched. Let me spell out what this fiction means. It means answering spectacle with spectacle. It means answering media traps with other media traps. It means holding in front of the media the irresistible bait of an unproven scandal. It means turning the table on a new form of inquisition that passes itself as journalism. It means pointing to the emperor’s new clothes. Ferry is using his clout as a minister and his prestige as a philosopher to hold a mirror to the French media. “You think what I just did is disgusting? How come you do it everyday? How come you do it right now?” Ferry is starting a guerrilla war. Humor can turn into a weapon. Let me conclude by appropriating an old joke.

Ferry enters a breakfast room and calls the waiter.

Ferry: “Please give me a cup of coffee, but tepid; two rolls, but stale; please also bring me a watery omelet and burned toast. Oh, and could you manage to be very, very slow?”

Waiter: “But, sir, how can you ask that? We have no such things in this hotel!”

Ferry: Oh really? Why then do you serve them everyday?”