French press review 16 March 2011

Two stories dominate this morning's front pages, but neither has a lot of clarity. Nobody seems to know how serious the situation at the damaged Japanese nuclear facility of Fukushima really is. And nobody seems to know who controls what in Libya.

But no journalist worth the name ever let the facts - or the lack of them - get in the way of a good story. The Japanese nuclear crisis, and the David and Goliath struggle between the Libyans and their mad leader are clearly good stories.

Fukushima combines the fear of nuclear contamination with the almost complete absence of real information. The temptation has proved too much for the French headline writers and their audience-chasing editors.

Thus, the normally sober Le Monde announces "Japanese nuclear plant out of control".

Le Figaro's main headline is even more down-market: "Japan's infernal spiral", it reads, accompanied by a huge colour photograph of a baby being tested for radiation by medical personnel.

The front page of business daily Les Echos is dominated by a picture of soldiers searching the ruins of a village destroyed by Friday's tsunami with the headline "The battle of Fukushima". The village is nowhere near Fukushima, but that's just a detail.

Libération's front page is straight out of a Steven Spielberg movie: a white suited official is shown, grotesquely back-lit by arc lamps at the damaged nuclear plant. The headline is the stark, and completely untrue, "Nuclear panic". 

The Japanese have shown themselves to be capable of courage and solidarity in the face of an awesome challenge. But there's been no hint of panic.

It is obvious that Japan is in serious trouble and that Fukushima is a hugely worrying part of the overall crisis. There have been fires and explosions at several reactors at the site; there has been speculation that at least one core housing has been damaged; abnormal radiation levels have prompted an evacuation of civilians from the area around Fukushima.

All the rest is science fiction.

The head of the European Atomic Safety Agency put it simply on French television last night, where he resisted an obvious attempt to force him to predict a nuclear Armageddon. He said that we don't know what's happening.

Only a handful of people have the necessary information, and they are all inside the Fukushima plant trying to limit the impact of the earthquake damage. There are worrying signs, but all this talk of meltdown, ruptured cores and massive radiation leaks is premature.

It may all turn out to be terribly true, but we can't make any definite statement on the basis of what we currently know. The trouble is: it's hard to turn that sort of measured response into a catchy headline.

The situation in Libya is not an easy one to decipher, either.

It would appear that forces loyal to Moammer Kadhafi are beginning to get the upper hand in the drive eastwards towards the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. Since we're talking about a trained and well-equipped army against a popular uprising, that's not too surprising.

But there's no clear information about events on the ground. What is sure is that neither the European Union nor the G8 group of industrialised nations want to get involved to help the rebels.

Everyone agrees that Kadhafi is a mad-dog pariah, but no one is prepared to raise a finger, or even a no-fly zone, against him.