The Narcissism of The New York Times’ Foreign Coverage

On Oct. 29, three more people were killed in France, their throats slit while they prayed inside a church in the southern city of Nice, by an attacker who continued to shout “Allahu akbar” even after he was detained and administered sedatives.

Shortly after the attack, Thomas Chatterton Williams, an American writer living in France, noted that the political leaders of Turkey and Pakistan “have been stoking anger at French society in general.” That context, he wrote, “has been largely unchallenged and even buttressed by Anglophone media imposing their own ideas of intersectionality where they don't fit.” Williams linked to an article in which the writer, Liam Duffy, describes how, in France, “a growing number of people, both in and out of government, feel that their country is being badly misread and misrepresented in the Anglosphere.” Duffy quotes from an article in the left-wing French daily Le Monde, in which the author, Hugo Micheron, a political scientist studying jihadist terror networks in France, calls the American media’s coverage of France “hallucinatory” and observes that: “The progressive media appear uncomfortable with the facts. In The New York Times and The Washington Post, the two most influential newspapers on the left, the term ‘jihadism’ never appears.”