Presswatch: Pantalonade

...So much of what foreigners write is so inexplicable and unimprovable, so...foreign, that Chancellor can entertain simply by translating and describing: Both La Repubblica of Rome and La Stampa of Turin gave dramatic front-page treatment to the heat wave in the United States, describing its effects as a "massacre...

...La Repubblica ran a long essay on the tooth anniversary of Friedrich von Hayek's death, in which it defended the Chicago economist's theories against Keynes's...

...But for now, Venezuela and Colombia are incomprehensible without recourse to the local press...

...Newly assigned to the Times's city beat, he penned a story titled "Trauma Centers Short of Patients As New York's Crime Rate Drops...

...After all, only the perpetrators can "break their silence...

...Both papers quoted the pope as advocating vacations in monasteries and convents...

...American journalists will eventually learn to treat these two stories as different aspects of one big story...

...Foreigners sometimes beat the pants off us...

...It's part of three highly intelligent pages on culture and the arts that appear every Monday...

...In the August 3o Washington Post, Africa correspondent Karl Vick reported from Bujumbura, Burundi, about a group of filmmakers who, with generous financial support from the Washington-based foundation Search for Common Ground, are trying to reconcile warring Hutus and Tutsis...

...One wonders...

...Vick doesn't ask whether maybe these people are bragging to the camera, or whether the reconciliation that results can be anything more than solidarity among psychopaths of both sides...

...Similar lessons can be taken from the Saturday Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the week's big paper much as our Sunday papers are...

...A Tutsi identified only as Celestine noted, "You get hate when someone is not open with you...

...The granite Scotsman at NATO," said Corriere della Sera of Milan...

...But the great delight of reading foreign papers, of course, is in seeing the familiar described in fresh ways...

...There was no bigger waste of time, he said, than reading foreign newspapers...

...Take the Repubblica article on Hayek mentioned above...

...The key was to get the perpetrators of the genocide who have themselves survived to tell their stories on camera, as a way to get over the "shame" and "denial...

...But once you talk openly, you don't have any hate for each other...

...First, no European country has a tradition of fact-based reporting as well developed as America's...

...But in the Internet era, one certainly gets fresh facts...

...But to read the Web-site of Venezuela's E/ Universal (eud.com) is to get a different impression...

...and the rise of Colombia's drug-financed FARC guerrillas on the other...

...Here he was right...

...C NN spent much of August flogging a prize-winning documentary about a certain type of foreign-news fan—the correspondent who travels into hot wars at enormous risks...

...Each European country seems to have its New York Times, a Paper of Record spurned by the middle classes for reflecting the conventional wisdom of the country's left-leaning elites...

...PRESSWATCH by Christopher Caldwell Pantalonade D wring the Clinton-Lewinsky scandals, I mentioned to a friend over lunch that there were important philosophical differences between new German Premier Gerhard Schroder's divorce-based gallivanting and our own president's preference for the traditional adultery-based version...

...In France, Le Monde...

...Maybe it's an easy job...

...Anyone who follows Latin American developments in our own press knows there are two huge stories developing in South America now: Hugo Chavez's pseudo-constitutional consolidation of a dictatorship in Venezuela...

...And one need be neither a linguist nor a profligate accumulator of foreign newsprint to get such pleasures...

...What's more, there was a lot of heated back-and-forth on the matter in the German, and even the French, press...

...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is senior writer for the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press...

...My friend moaned...

...Since Rohde made his name with the Christian Science Monitor as a Yugoslavia reporter—winning a Pulitzer for breaking the story of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — one would expect, if CNN is right, a heightened sensitivity on matters of man's cruelty...

...If this is reconciliation, it's a reconciliation that takes no account of the 200,000 Burundians who won't "break their silence" ever, ever again...

...That a newspaper would run its big culture features on a Monday is an indication that the joyless American work-week has not yet established itself firmly in Italy...

...But it's a splendid column...

...The American Spectator • October 1999 45...

...in Germany, Die Zeit, which comes out weekly...

...44 October 19 99 The American Spectator Useful as Websites are, they're not the same as holding a paper in your hand...

...EUD's Chavez coverage had cross-links to the Colombian newspapers El Espectador and E/ Pais de Cali and the excellent, Bogota-based newsweekly Semana...

...Take the article David Rohde wrote for the New York Times on April 20, 1998...

...Chancellor's extraordinary "International Papers" column in Slate magazine (www.slate.com) has an eagle eye for what makes the foreign press so strange—and cross-links to the papers themselves...

...I was at least able to keep the argument open by pulling a newsweekly out of my briefcase...

...Of one Tutsi who hauled his best childhood friend off a bus and stabbed him to death, Vick wrote: He spoke with wonder of the sound when he pushed a knife into his friend's abdomen: "It was like a tire deflating...

...All of this ran, delightfully enough, over a graph headed, "At a Glance: Too Many Centers, Not Enough Trauma...

...Some experts," as the article put it, worried that the paucity of dead and maimed in New York's vacant lots and back alleys meant hard times for the medical stations set up to tend the shot and stabbed,and "could actually be compromising the level of care...

...Le Monde's economics page champions the market economy, and editor Erik Izraelewicz even published a ringing defense of globalization in 1997, called The World That Awaits Us...

...Marcel Martin, the outgoing director of Staten Island University Hospital's trauma center...

...If Europe is going Luddite, it's not among the readers of the quality dailies...

...It had a picture of Bill and Monica, and above it the headline: "Has the World's Only Superpower Gone Insane...

...But late summer established a new gold standard for the banalization of violence...

...The Colombia story is the Venezuela story...

...My lunch companion may have a point about increasing ideological uniformity among the press worldwide...

...Called "Dying to Tell the Story," it celebrated the special perspective such journalists bring as tribunes of humanity in inhumane situations...

...The FAZ is swollen neither by comics nor by extra news...

...When that mendacious Scottish mediocrity George Robertson was named head of NATO, Chancellor was quick to lampoon the Continent's fetish for charismatic leadership and its weakness for sobriquets: "A 'highlander' at the head of NATO," was the headline in Le Figaro of Paris...

...To survive under such pressure takes a certain hardness, and it's possible for a journalist to get so deep inside a world of atrocities that he can't write unless he goes native...

...Much of what one learns from foreign papers comes from their publishing—as opposed to their journalistic — aspects...

...But that these culture pages are a remnant of what five years ago was a special eight-page mini-magazine bannered on page one is a sign that the American work week is well on its way...

...Speculation grew throughout South America that Chavez, who has described himself as the avatar of the nineteenth-century Andean liberator Simon Bolivar, has not just national but regional aspirations...

...My own appreciation of the Clinton presidency has been vastly enriched by knowing that Le Figaro describes the president's political career as a pantalonade...

...Whether foreign papers bring a fresh ideology to events we already know about is debatable...

...Second, as globalism's elites grow more and more alike, all one gets out of a European paper is canned American prejudices poured out in another language...

...Rohde went around interviewing trauma specialists, who regaled him with observations straight out of Monty Python: "With too few patients, trauma surgeons who must execute complex, life-saving maneuvers at high speed are unable to keep their skills honed, said Dr...

...That's thanks to the polyglot Alexander Chancellor, who twenty years ago was an unlikely moderate at the helm of Britain's high-Tory weekly the Spectator, and is today an unlikely moderate at the snob-left daily the Guardian...

...in Italy, La Repubblica...

...Not a bit of it...

...When he concluded his account, the admitted killer said he not only felt relieved of his burden, but oddly hopeful that, because the people he had considered enemies have broken their silence as well, both sides might be moving beyond denial, toward reconciliation...

...Yet all of them seem in the last couple of years to have made their peace with the new globalism...

...Here he was wrong...

...All three of these bien-pensant institutions have traditionally expressed knee-jerk fears of American hegemony — hyperpuissance is the term most in favor at Le Monde...

...What a crisis...

...Corriere della Sera of Milan reported a row at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, where the authorities have imposed a ban on under-16s attending an "erotic" edited version of Shakespeare's tragedies...

...Rather it's a Stellen-Angebote ("Job Offers") section that adds the heft...

...The idea that Germany has to keep its taxes so astronomical to pay for unemployment insurance can be refuted by weighing the Stellen-Angebote section, which tips the scales at about two pounds...

...On August 27, as Chavez partisans blockaded legislators from entering the national assembly, the big story at eud.com concerned Chavez's stated willingness to meet with FARC over the head of Colombian president Andres Pastrana...