Truth over the Air

Made in Algiers, the recording reproduced with chilling immediacy the crackle of guns as French soldiers mowed down unarmed Europeans on Oran's streets, the moans of the wounded and dying, the desperate, unheeded cries of French officers commanding their troops to cease fire.

Frenchmen heard these appalling sounds not on their government-owned radio and TV monopoly, RTF (for Radiodiffusion Television Franc,aise), but in broadcasts from an independent station headquartered in the tiny principality of Monaco.

And by last week the infuriated French government itself had declared a war to the death on the bold interloper of the air.

The voice is that of Europe Number One, which went on the air five years ago with a commodity rare in France.

Frenchmen get their news straight enough from the country's press--which is not government-owned and not particularly cowed by France's punitive press-control laws. But they get nothing of the sort from RTF. which is a glib and obedient government parrot. So biased--and so boring--are RTF's newscasts that its reporter teams are frequently hissed when they are recognized on Paris streets.

Under no obligation to please anyone but its audience, Europe Number One tries to stick to the facts. Time and again, its hard-driving news squads have scored impressive beats on RTF. In 1959 Europe Number One scooped RTF by six hours with on-the-scene recordings of the Frejus Dam break. During last summer's peasant sitdown strike in Brittany, RTF prudently quoted Lc Figaro, a Parisian daily that put the rosiest possible complexion on the strike; Number One's mikes picked up, live, the protests of the Breton peasants themselves.

Europe Number One's audience has risen to 14 million--more than the combined audience of all four of RTF's radio stations in France. Goaded to fury, the French government has begun to close in. Buying through front men, it has cornered a 32 1/2% block of the station's stock--second only to the 42%-48% still held by Europe Number One's proprietor, French Millionaire (transport) Sylvain Floirat.

Other pressures are being subtly applied. Rumors drift through the French press: that the government has threatened to cancel a handsome contract with the Louis Bregeut Aeronautical Works--which Floirat owns; that Monaco, which has a 5% stockholding in Europe Number One, has been urged to sell it to France. How long Europe Number One can endure the governmental siege is uncertain. But while it does, 14 million Frenchmen presumably will go on listening.

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