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French Newspapers for Kids Bring Home Horrors of War
Daily during the war, 11-year-old Adrien has trundled to the mail box, picked out his copy of France's popular newspaper for youngsters and read about the horrors of the conflict in Iraq. This week, he's found the news hard to stomach. Most disturbing, he says, was a photo Tuesday of a terrified Iraqi girl fleeing the fighting on her father's shoulders, with smoking tanks in the distance. "She looks so sad, I think she's crying," he said. "It's awful, I am against this war."

"Little Daily," aimed at children aged 7-10, is at the center of a debate in France about whether to expose or shield children from images of the fighting. When the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, "Little Daily" editor Francois Dufour dropped the usual stories about animals or nature. Instead, he set out to explain in simple language everything from weapons of mass destruction to the brutality of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. "We have to show reality, war is terrible," he said in an interview this week. Children "will feel less in a bubble, it's an eye-opener on the world and the world is not a calm place."

From his newsroom at the back of a courtyard in central Paris, Dufour publishes four daily newspapers exclusively for youngsters from kindergarten to high school. Dufour says the paper is delivered daily to 200,000 homes but that readership through schools is closer to 2 million. His newspapers have run photos of American prisoners of war, blood on a hospital floor, injured civilians or plumes of smoke rising above Baghdad. "In Iraq, people are dying and suffering," read a headline this week, with a picture showing an Iraqi man in tears surrounded by the coffins of his dead relatives.

Dufour insists that his papers offer a balanced view of the war, free of editorial influence. But a cartoon in Wednesday's edition of "L'Actu" (The News), for kids aged 14 and above, had a distinct anti- American bent. It showed an American soldier firing four bullets through the stomach of an Iraqi civilian under the caption: "I am feeding Iraqis."

When this is over, perhaps Dufour can run a special historical series, focusing on the horrors of the last war France had on it's soil. Maybe he can draw some pictures of an American soldier firing four bullets through the stomach of a German soldier under the caption "I am liberating France." And he could have one that said "In France, people were dying and suffering."


Posted by: Bruce 2003-04-11
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=12869