Anchorwoman’s $200,000 Salary Sparks Strike by French Reporters

French radio and television reporters vowed Friday to continue a strike touched off by a TV anchorwoman’s salary.

The strike, which began Tuesday, was called to protest the salary--reportedly $200,000 a year--paid to Christine Ockrent, an American newscaster who anchors the evening news program on the government station Antenne 2. Since joining the network last month, she has become one of the most popular figures on the French evening news.

But the strike has also stirred up the chronic issue of political interference in French broadcasting, and it has emerged as the first major domestic challenge to Premier Michel Rocard’s government.

At stake, media critics say, may be the ability of the government networks to survive in the face of the private, commercial competition introduced here four years ago.

For Ockrent, who in 1981 became the first woman to anchor a prime-time television newscast in France, the strike has become a personal trial.

For several weeks, since the dispute arose, she has been the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles and political cartoons. On her nightly 8 o’clock news program she has been reduced to reading material supplied by news agencies, with only a few live reports from non-striking reporters.

“I had to continue because the show must go on,” she said Thursday in an interview. “But I personally am very grieved to be at the center of this episode, in which I have been insulted by all sorts of people.”

Some of the striking technicians and reporters said they do not blame Ockrent personally.

“She is only the drop of water that made the vase overflow,” an assistant director said, asking not to be identified by name. “Nobody is against her personally.”

But senior reporter Silvie Marion, a veteran of 20 years at the French government network who is paid about $24,000 a year, said the inequities in salaries have caused deep bitterness.

“It would take me 12 years to make what she will make in one year,” she said.

Mitterrand Avoids Dispute

French President Francois Mitterrand has avoided getting directly involved in the controversy, which in a sense he precipitated in 1984 by approving the first privately owned television station. Now there are six television stations, two public and four private.

Still, on the issue of whether public television should pay “star salaries” to newscasters in order to stay competitive with private stations, which pay much higher salaries, Mitterrand offered some indirect support for Ockrent.

He said he does not concern himself with such matters, but added obliquely, “Talent and work must be compensated.”

Ockrent said the remark constituted the first kind words she had heard in days.

“I was grateful,” she said. “Until then, I had the feeling the whole country was spitting in my face.”

The Socialist government itself may be partly to blame for the conflict. Claude Contamine, president of Antenne 2, hired Ockrent last month to shore up the government station’s evening news program and agreed to pay her almost double what she had been getting at the private station TF1.

Meanwhile, Communications Minister Catherine Tasca, a powerful figure in Rocard’s Cabinet, seized on the salary issue as a possible means of forcing Contamine to resign. Contamine was appointed to the post by the previous government but his contract does not expire until next year.

Tasca feels that public television, which now airs dozens of American programs, including “CHiPs” and “L.A. Law,” declined sharply under the previous government.

According to the satirical investigative French weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaine, Contamine was on the verge of resigning until he was contacted by “the very highest officials” and encouraged to stay on until his contract expires.

Many political analysts think the phone call came from Rocard, who is said to think his zealous communication minister may have erred by inciting the television salary fracas, which started at Antenne 2 and spread Thursday to a second public station, FR3, and the national radio network, Radio-France.

Control of television and radio has been one of the most controversial issues in France since the days of the late President Charles de Gaulle, who exercised such dictatorial control over the government networks that he once ordered a management shake-up because weather and other reports were too negative.