WHEN Audrey Pulvar, a television journalist from the French Caribbean, started looking for work in Paris five years ago she was told by potential employers that “the public is not ready for a black news presenter”, writes Matthew Campbell.

The response reflected widespread racial discrimination in France, a scourge the government vowed last week to combat after the worst civil unrest in four decades. Some employers have already begun the battle, however, and that is where Pulvar comes in.

After initially being rejected she is now one of the first black television news readers in France. “I really am an exception,” said Pulvar, who since September has been reading the evening news to 6m viewers of the state-run France 3 channel.

“France has never had a Trevor McDonald,” she added, referring to Britain’s knighted broadcaster. “There are very few Franco-African or Asian origin people on camera.”

Paradoxically, one big hurdle to diversity has been the French ideal that all citizens are equal, regardless of race or colour. This makes it all but illegal to hire people on the basis of religion or ethnic origin.

French television, nevertheless, has been quietly issuing guidelines to producers. “We’re not allowed to refer to colour of skin,” said Edouard Pellet, a journalist of Algerian descent in charge of diversifying the state’s five channels. “We cannot adopt an American-style quota system for yellow and black people and so on. But we are quietly turning our television screens into a mirror of the public, 10% of which is of foreign origin.”

Pulvar, 34, found herself in demand. “I remember going to one interview,” she recalled, “and this woman came into the room and said to me, even before I had opened my mouth, ‘Great, we’re looking for people just like you’.”

In 2004 she got a job as a regional news presenter based in Marseilles. “It was in an area where 25% of the vote goes to the National Front,” she said, referring to the far-right political party.

The channel did not lose viewers yet Pulvar is not alone in thinking France has a long way to go. “I am very happy here, but racism is widespread,” she said, adding that the rioting by youths of immigrant origin was inexcusable but rooted in justifiable grievances. Employers are often accused of rejecting applicants because they have a “foreign” name or live in one of the grim housing estates that ring most cities.

Pulvar said she “knocked on a lot of doors”. On one occasion she was denied a junior job on camera by a producer who told her: “We’ve already got one black and we don’t want two.”

When Pulvar, who had worked for six years as a television anchor in Martinique, started work at France 3 “a lot of (colleagues) said I was only there because I was black. I had to demonstrate that I was also very well qualified for the job”.

She said she had noticed an enormous difference between Britain, which she has visited regularly, and France in terms of attitudes towards minorities.

“Of course there are imbeciles everywhere,” she said, “but as a black person in London you feel a freedom you don’t get here. You don’t feel you have to explain or justify your presence. In London I do not have to explain that I am not a thief or a terrorist. My black friends all say they have the same feeling when they visit Britain or America.”

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