Dince the Hamas attack on October 7, the production of the major international media has been scrutinized on a daily basis. Agence France-Presse (AFP) is no exception, even though its production is not intended for the general public but for the media, its clients. In Paris, critics converge to revive this old idea that the acronym AFP actually designates the France-Palestine Agency. But the French reader will perhaps be surprised to learn that the much more widespread criticism leveled at the agency, and not just in the Middle East, makes it an agent of Israel.
Excessive caution, which would hide bias, is often criticized by the agency. In Paris, we stigmatize its semantic modesty in describing Hamas as a terrorist group, and too bad if the agency has been applying this rule to any movement for more than twenty years, no matter how horrible it may be. In Beirut, people are surprised that it is waiting to have all the evidence to attribute to Israel the shooting which seriously injured one of its photographers or targeted its office in Gaza. And too bad if it’s because the agency applies its rules here regarding the attribution of responsibilities.
Or else, a lack of attention, a lack of responsiveness are pointed out, like this delay in report on a screening organized by the Israeli authorities. And too bad if the agency, because it has a permanent team on site, had from the very first hours described the atrocities of October 7 with its own images, its own words, without disguise. Isolating a subject, a report, and concentrating your fire on this single piece of the puzzle to discredit the entire coverage is the assurance of an unequal fight. To the credit of detractors, it is true that it is difficult to have an exhaustive vision of the production, knowing that the agency broadcasts 4,000 dispatches, 3,000 photos, 300 videos every day.
Under the pressure of real time
The agency listens to all criticism and the debate is lively within it, as it is in many editorial offices around the world. The AFP has no problem recognizing that it can be improved. Its dispatches are sometimes updated several times an hour, as the news covered becomes clearer, and these updates transparently show the corrections made. She has already publicly acknowledged factual errors and questionable editorial choices. She measures her particular responsibility in Gaza where the media are often totally dependent on her, because they cannot be present there on their own. Because the complexity of the conflict no longer needs to be demonstrated, it is increasing its vigilance and did not wait to send reinforcements to its office in Jerusalem and its regional center in Nicosia. And she carries out self-criticism on a daily basis, since it is the role of her editor-in-chief responsible for ethics and editorial principles to study the production, specify the instructions, and ask that certain imbalances be corrected. He doesn’t shy away from it.
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