PARIS, Nov 14: A documentary broadcast this week on French private network M6 has revealed that if President Jacques Chirac managed to accede to the French presidency in 1995, it was largely the doing of an American media consultant, Roger Ailes, who previously had been responsible for inspiring the media skills of two of America’s most media-savvy presidents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr.

The revelation came in the documentary about Chirac’s principal media adviser, his own daughter Claude, who noted that she decided to take charge of her father’s presidential ambitions back in 1988, after his defeat at the hands of President Francois Mitterrand.

Mitterrand at the time had made use of the PR methods inculcated by another media guru, Jacques Seguela, one of the founders of the Euro RSCG communications agency — which, interestingly, was the consultancy where Claude Chirac got her start in the PR business.