From the Metula News Agency: France 2’s special correspondents stumble onto a snag in the US. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

That snag had a name, and that name is Little Green Footballs.

On Thursday 23 June, France 2’s weekly program Envoyé special offered to initiate its spectators to the worldwide phenomenon of the blog, this new generation of web sites that have become a real social phenomenon.

The blog is a space that offers the possibility of spreading one’s ideas on the web, without having to possess advanced technical knowledge in computing. The interest of this media lies for a large part in the almost instantaneous reception of your visitors’ reactions.

Blog globe is the title of the report that Florent Muller and his cameraman undertook to film on behalf of the public television channel. On such a subject, they could not avoid the remarkable American blog that in 2004 received, from the Washington Post, the supreme reward of Best Blog of the Year. In these conditions, on 12 February, the intrepid duo from France 2 headed for Los Angeles to meet Charles Johnson, the founder of LGF.

The “Little Green Footballs” blog

What Muller was not prepared for was that, experiencing the quirks of the boomerang effect, he was to fall, in an instant, from the status of interviewer to that of a suspected journalist and subjected to a real grilling. And yet that is what happened to the French reporter when, during the discussion with Johnson, the latter decided to request “news of the controversy concerning Mohammed Al-Dura”. To be sure that Florent Muller had grasped his question, Johnson added that it was the case “in which France 2 is alleged to have deliberately helped promote Palestinian propaganda”. The founder of LGF later confided to his readers that “at first, he [Muller] seemed not to know what I was talking about” ; then, luckily, “the cameraman chimed in and said, ‘Oh yes, the Israeli envoy has admitted there is no controversy, it’s all over.’“

He did not reckon with the fact that the LGF bloggers are very serious people and they have been following the articles of the Ména devoted to the Netzarim Controversy, meticulously analyzing them in their tiniest details, right from their first publication. So Muller’s host was perfectly aware that eleven days before their meeting, the Express’ editor in chief, Denis Jeambar, had related on a Paris radio the “stagings” that Talal Abu-Rahma’s report is replete with as well as the inexistent child’s agony, that Enderlin had always claimed to possess.

Even if he had searched hard, Arlette Chabot’s reporter in Los Angeles could not have found a worse ear to reel off his “no more controversy”. All the more so since five days before his meeting with the visibly badly informed correspondent, the columns of one of the most widely read US dailies, the Herald Tribune, gave a run-down in great details what has become the greatest audio-visual imposture in history.

The contributors to Little Green Footballs, people who generally have a remarkable level of culture, did not at all find the flavor of this French cuisine spiced with nettles to their taste, and they said so unhesitatingly, setting off a deluge of more than 500 comments [1] that were particularly caustic and cynical, about Charles Enderlin, as well as the French government, its press and their very strange interpretation of freedom of expression. The problem with Americans is that when they see that you have been taking them for a ride, they tend to let you know what they think in no uncertain terms.

This torrent set off by the Yankee bloggers, over the head of the imposters, the warmongers of the French public television channel and the government that covers them, inspired Florent Muller to say, in the opening words of his report, that “Charles Johnson’s voice is composed, his manners amenable : quite the opposite of his blog.”

In spite of that, we must recognize that, to their credit, the two special correspondents from France 2, caught unprepared by the phenomenon they had come to describe, did not cancel the broadcasting of their report on the pretext that they had been caught red-handed telling a whopper by the 80 000 daily readers of the LGF, that they themselves describe, among the blogs of the blogosphere, as “one of the most influential”. After all, Muller and his cameraman are no more accountable for the malpractice of their Jerusalem colleague nor for the false reports he delivered them, no more than for the irresponsible cover-up strategies resorted to by the channel they work for.

Read the whole thing, lizardoids, and exult in your trans-oceanic majesty.