French Students Protest - blah, blah, blah

Who missed the images on TV of the student protests this week? The students and all the other riff-raff with an agenda and desire to protest anything got together this week. And so what...it was just another protest/strike/greve against something. It just happened to be larger this time.

American media did their usual job of getting all the juicy pics into their viewers minds. One of my French colleagues watched about 10 seconds of "reporting" from Paris that showed nothing but fist fighting and skirmishes with police. I can't deny there was some violence, this was not the blind rioting that took place last November and any strike cannot be equated to that.

Well, that does make good fodder, but it isn't very good journalism. Let me give another example of this. On Tuesday, Protest Day, a "reporter" from a Washington DC radio station called to find out just how bad the travel industry was being pummeled by this uprising.

Containing a laugh, I explained that there had been NO interruptions of any kind. There were delays expected for those traveling by train or using the metro in Paris, but apart from that it was business as usual. In fact, because like most strikes in France, this was organized and we knew that it would start at 9am, so we handled any transfers of customers to airports or tours before 9am and nobody was affected. He was happy to know people were taken care, but his parting shot was "hopefully I will contact you again one day when we have something positive to report on France".

It became clear to me that it was all about selling bad images, the worst ones taken at just the right moment, to poke the French in the eye again. I've always known that bashing France was good for the media, it is a good thing that Hollywood helps balance out that extreme picture with an extremely rosy image of Paris and "La vie Francaises"!

So, bottom line; yes strikes happen. Its a French thing. They accept and deal with it. IN the travel business its not easy to work with this, and I certainly don't condone it, but if you are going to France you best be prepared to accept some delay at some point in time. Yes, France has to work out its social problems. However, the media will never change, and savvy international travelers know better than to believe the crap they see on TV.

L