Complete and Utter Zebu

The past few months haven’t been too good for President Sarkozy of France on the credibility front. There were several reports of the lengths he goes to to conceal his true height and then the rumpus over his Facebook page (see our earlier post) which showed him hacking down the Berlin Wall, even though it later turned out he wasn’t even in Berlin on the day the Wall fell.

Now Canal+ TV in France has shown more than just a little sleight of hand employed by his UMP party in a political video promoting the benefits of French living under M. Sarkozy. For it turns out that most of the images of idyllic France are actually from…um…the United States.

The mother and child in the image at the top of this blog, for instance, are in Cambria in California. As they explain in the video clip, the energy-efficient house is in Escondido, also in California, while the schoolchildren are from Oshkosh in Wisconsin. There’s even a car which has American licence plates and a child playing American football.

It seems almost all the video was bought in from Getty Images. Even if they were trying to save money, you would have thought somebody would have looked at it before it was broadcast. Apparently it’s not the first time UMP have produced a video that turns out to be Utter Zebu. At the time of the Presidential Election in 2007, the party’s campaign video included images from California as well as New York.

There are plenty more examples of promotional ads, most for tourism purposes, with beauty spots masquerading as entirely different places in Complete and Utter Zebu. It isn’t only in France that it happens.

Related post: A politician talks Zebu – this time it’s Sarkozy