Geez, can we love the french any more?
French TV rapped over pope satire
Wednesday, May 11, 2005 Posted: 10:38 AM EDT (1438 GMT)
PARIS, France (Reuters) -- France's media council has sharply reprimanded a private television channel for satirizing Pope Benedict as "Adolf II" and saying he blessed Catholics "in the name of the Father, the Son and the Third Reich."
The Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) warned Canal Plus that it faced stiff monetary fines if it again violated a rule to "respect the different political, cultural and religious sensitivities of the public," a CSA spokesman said on Wednesday.
The popular Canal Plus news satire show "Les Guignols de l'Info" (The News Clowns), which uses puppets to spoof current events, aired the offending program on April 20, one day after German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope.
The company's management subsequently apologised, but a closed-door meeting of the CSA on Tuesday decided to take the unusual step of putting it on notice -- a rare step in the 17 years that the sometimes scathing program has been on the air.
Protesting against the broadcast shortly after it was aired, France's Roman Catholic bishops said it had made a travesty of the values Benedict stood for "and put all Germans in the same category as the most abominable of regimes".
CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations, also issued a protest against the broadcast that mentioned Benedict's short wartime membership in the Hitler Youth organization, which he has said he was forced to join.
"The pope himself has never hidden this episode of his youth," it said, adding his critics would probably also have been in the Hitler Youth if they had lived in Germany then.
"Joseph Ratzinger has amply shown that he rejects anti-Semitism and we are convinced that his experiences in his youth helped strengthen his rejection of all racism." |
