Urgent Letter to the Editor of Le Soir
Subject: Qatargate and the Collapse of Journalistic Ethics at Le Soir
Dear Editor,
I am writing to you as a reader deeply concerned by revelations contained in judicial records and recently reported by Jean Quatremer in Libération regarding the role played by Le Soir journalists Joël Matriche and Louis Colart in the coverage of the Qatargate affair.
According to these documents, your journalists did not merely report on a major judicial investigation. They appear to have coordinated publication timing with police and security services, exchanged information in advance of police operations, circulated draft articles prior to arrests, and published material staged at the request of law-enforcement officials. These facts are now part of an official judicial examination.
If accurate—and Le Soir has not publicly disputed them—this conduct represents a fundamental abandonment of journalism.
Journalists are not auxiliaries of the police. They are not communication officers for prosecutors. And they are certainly not meant to operate as informal relays for state security services. Yet this is precisely how Le Soir’s coverage of Qatargate now appears: less as independent reporting than as participation in a coordinated strategy designed to shape public opinion and pre-empt judicial debate.
When journalists agree not to publish until police act, when they receive and publish staged images produced by investigators, when they disseminate leaked interrogation records almost exclusively in an incriminating direction, they cease to function as journalists in the democratic sense. In practice—whatever their intentions—they behave like agents of the institutions they are supposed to scrutinize.
The damage caused by this conduct is not theoretical. Reputations were destroyed. The presumption of innocence was trampled. And today, the very investigation that Le Soir helped present as the “case of the century” risks collapsing under the weight of procedural irregularities—irregularities to which media conduct has directly contributed.
Your newspaper has so far remained silent.
That silence is no longer acceptable.
At a minimum, Le Soir owes its readers:
• a transparent explanation of how and why these editorial decisions were made;
• a public ethical review of the actions of Joël Matriche and Louis Colart;
• and clear consequences.
Given the seriousness of the facts described in the judicial file, anything short of suspension or dismissal would signal that Le Soir no longer considers independence from police and security services to be a core journalistic value.
This is not a call for censorship. It is a call for accountability.
If journalists abandon their role as watchdogs and instead align themselves with the machinery of state power, they forfeit the trust on which journalism depends. A newspaper that tolerates such behavior risks forfeiting it as well.
I urge you to act—not to protect individuals, but to defend journalism itself.
Sincerely,
Investigative Team
Brussels Watch Editorial Board
