eurealist.co.uk

I have lost count of the times I have read that British Eusceptisism is fed by the disreputable anti-EU British press, which by the way is owned by devious foreigners press barons, who for their own unspecified reasons will do anything and make up any myth in order to further their again unspecified nefarious designs. That to hold a referendum in Britain would be to fall into the trap of these seedy press barons, who would only use it to undermine the great campaign of the EU`s Les Grand Fromage. (Thanks Paxman)

The Guardian however puts the lid on that particular piece of insidious claptrap, all the media in France were gung-ho for the constitution if there was any truth that British were being mislead by the media, then the French to a man and woman would have voted Yes.

Serge Halimi The Guardian

There is one tiny problem with most of the analysis of last Sunday’s vote in France. Those who probe the motivations of the large majority who voted no (54.87%) forget to remind us that they, overwhelmingly, voted yes.
For more than six months, all the leading commentators in the media heaped praise on the constitutional project. France’s two biggest media owners (and weapons manufacturers) endorsed the yes side: Serge Dassault, a conservative senator, did so in an editorial in one of his many magazines; Arnaud Lagardère spoke to a pro-yes rally, cheered by Nicolas Sarkozy and most of the cabinet.
Most commentators have observed that Jacques Chirac has been stung by this defeat, but the rout of France’s mainstream media is even more impressive. From the rightwing television channel TF1 to the “leftwing” weekly le Nouvel Observateur, and including le Monde, Libération, the business press, the major radio stations, even women’s and sports publications - they all warned and railed, they all censored and twisted. Yet, their propaganda was blunted by an unexpected surge of democracy. Thousands of well-attended meetings discussed the constitutional treaty. And, bit by bit, the sense of inevitability that it would be easily ratified by a mildly interested electorate was torn apart.
Indeed the outrage about media bias became a leading issue of the campaign - not least because it encapsulated so many of the things that this referendum came to be about: representation, the elite and class.
The problem is obvious on the political side. Last February more than 90% of French deputies had backed the constitution; it garnered the support of only 45% of the voters. The gap is no less obvious when it comes to informing the people: the leading journalists, who often live in Paris, an increasingly bourgeois city, seem to write and speak for the affluent.
And the rich did vote yes by a healthy margin, just like 66% of the Parisians.
But elsewhere it was quite another story: whereas 74% of the voters earning more than €4,500 a month backed the constitutional project, 66% of the voters earning less than €1,500 a month voted against. In ultra-wealthy Neuilly (a Paris suburb where many industrial and media tycoons reside, and whose mayor is the presidential hopeful Sarkozy) 82.5% voted yes. Mining cities of northern France and the poorest districts of Marseille were equally lopsided: 84% of Avion (Nord-Pas-de Calais) and 78% of Marseille’s 15th district voted no.
Granted, Chirac has lost. Yet it should not take long for the Socialists to wonder how well a party of the left is doing when 80% of the workers and the unemployed, 60% of the young and a large proportion of its own voters desert its official position on such an important issue.