13.08.2007
On Friday 10 August, Sam Lauthan, President and Polit Bureau member of the MMM, MLA for Constituency No. 3 for that party, resigned from his offices in the Party, but not as Honourable of the Legislative Assembly. Some news indeed! Front page stuff, big titles and all.
So on Saturday, what do we see in Le Defi, Le Mauricien, L'Express: nothing, nowt, nanye, nada, rien! Do our main newspapers have such poor sources of information from within the MMM; hard to believe. However, at the weekly Berenger press conference on Saturday morning, the subject is brought up in response to a question from the 5-Plus journalist, and Berenger explains the reasons for Lauthan's frustrations. Yet the Week-End reports the double resignation of Lauthan as an information communicated by Berenger himself to the MMM Central Committee of Saturday afternoon, and confirmed to the usual Week-End journalist, after the CC meeting.
All the Sunday papers did mention the resignation of the President and Polit Bureau member of the MMM, but only in little boxes within other articles or as a small item in the Marmite Politique column. Nowhere does an item of news of this political nature and importance manage a front page headline or even an main article of its own.
So what are the possible conclusions? Either that all the newspapers knew that this resignation was just a little transient and petty blackmail by Lauthan, and as such did not deserve any more coverage that what it got, or else that the MMM party had become so politically insignificant that the resignation of its president is not much news, or the third possibility is that, in general, the MMM of Berenger still gets a lot of protection from the press and its journalists.
RS