Criticism
The Guignols have been criticised for being leftist and populist and for presenting a cynical and over-simplified version of reality and politics. The show's authors have admitted leftist leanings. One critic, Erik Svane, has accused the show of being anti-American.
After the departure of two of the original authors in the late 1990s, the show has been criticized as lacking wit and freshness and having become too overtly populist and partisan. Some critics claim that the show is in decline. The show's treatment of Nicolas Sarkozy has been criticized as biased. Bruno Gaccio, prior to the French presidential election of 2007, was said to have admitted that he meant the Guignols to openly campaign against Sarkozy, but later stated that he had been misquoted. In February 2012 the controversy jumped by three polemical videos to Spanish sportspeople. In the first video, Rafael Nadal (Spanish tennis player known), drinking water in a gas station, and urinated in place to refuel, and his car reached the speed of 280 km / h, when French gendarmes arrested him for speeding, and at the end reading "the Spanish athletes do not win by chance." In another video, Alberto Contador, the Tour de France champion, was the butt of jokes, saying the video that not only if you donate blood you can save a child with leukemia, an anemic or a victim of trafficking, but it is can win the Tour de France. In the third video, Iker Casillas, Pau Gasol and Rafael Nadal signed a document with needles instead of pens. After hearing this, several Spanish sportspeople have demanded the program with 54,534 euros plus 96 euros compensation for moral damages. Some analysts believe that relations between France and Spain will become more rough by these parodies, since Spain "are considered aberrant," and France says "everyone can express their opinions.".
Read more about this topic: Les Guignols De L'info
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)