Paris Threatens to Sue Fox News over Misreporting

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Summary: The city of Paris threatens to sue Fox News for misreporting.

Have we arrived at an age in international politics where the language in common is legalese? Perhaps so, now that the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has responded to Fox News’ erroneous claims about France with the threat of a lawsuit.

  

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Fox News has claimed France and other European countries contained “no-go zones” where non-Muslims are prohibited from visiting and which are run by Sharia law. Paris, as a city, found this reporting if not simply a complete misrepresentation of the situation, in the least insulting.

“When we’re insulted, and we’ve had an image, then I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed,” Hidalgo told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

So a city is going to sue a news network: this is how we settle being insulted nowadays.

Michael Clemente, the executive vice president of Fox News, said “We empathize with the citizens of France as they go through a healing process and return to everyday life. However, we find the Mayor’s comments regarding a lawsuit misplaced.”

Well yes, misplaced, if not silly and frivolous.

“The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced,” said Hidalgo, speaking, peculiarly, of prejudice, and also using that word “honor,” as if her city had been slapped with a glove.

“This is just an attention-getter,” opined Bill O’Reilly, Fox’s most popular host, whose guest, media analyst Bernie Goldberg, also said “I don’t know what the laws are in France. If this were in America, it would be called a frivolous lawsuit… Anybody can sue anybody, but a city can’t win a lawsuit because it’s been insulted.”

The likelihood of such a suit succeeding is dismal, but perhaps the threat is some sort of gesture, spoken in the language of the times: legal threat.

News Source: CNN