From The Globe and Mail:

President Nicolas Sarkozy is one of the rare democratic leaders who can say the media helps him look better in print than he does in real life.

Paris Match, the celebrity magazine owned by one of the French President's best friends, did him the favour this week of airbrushing away Mr. Sarkozy's rather unsightly love handles in a photograph of him in swim trunks.

The Elysée Palace denied it had a hand in the touchup.

"We only deal with the President's political and diplomatic line," presidential spokesman David Martignon said yesterday. "For the rest, we're rather bad at working with Photoshop."

By doing its nip and tuck on the presidential waist, however, the magazine provided more fodder for those who question the propriety of Mr. Sarkozy's chummy relations with French media barons.

Paris Match is one of a string of publications owned by Arnaud Lagardère, an aerospace company chairman who once said he and Mr. Sarkozy were as close as brothers.

Last year, Mr. Lagardère fired the editor who made a decision to run a cover photo of Mr. Sarkozy's wife, Cecilia, with another man during the couple's separation in 2005. The magazine's staff staged a one-day protest strike, calling the editor's firing "political revenge."

In another incident three months ago, Mr. Lagardère's Sunday newspaper, Journal du Dimanche, killed an article reporting that Ms. Sarkozy did not vote in the presidential election.

The paper's journalists complained in an open letter that the story was pulled in order to kowtow to the owner, although the editor in charge said he believed publishing the information would have trespassed on the Sarkozy family's private life.