Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 23:29:39 -0500 From: Enrique Diaz-Alvarez <enrique at ee.cornell.edu>
David Dorkin wrote:
> As
> an American raised in 5 countries, I can assure you that Le Monde, La
> Jornada, Liberation, La Repubblica, El Pais, Frankfurter Rundschau, Die
> Zeit, the Guardian and the Independant all provide top-level
> international coverage (not just of disasters or one-time events as the
> Times tends to do, not to mention the others) and they publish critical
> pieces and analysis that the Times wouldn't touch.
It is always fun to shock American lefties at parties trashing their beloved NYT, especially given that, unlike most Europeans, I normally try to avoid gratuitous yank-bashing. It may or may not be, like Doug says, the voice of the American ruling class, but the really remarkable thing about it is just how mediocre it is. The problem is lack of reference points. Compared to the swap sheets that pass for newspapers in most American cities, it may appear as an excellent paper, but compared to leading foreign newspapers, it just doesn't stack up. First, most of its space is ads. Consequently, it barely has room for 30-35 stories outside of sports and local news in its daily edition, compared to the 100+ you find in El Pais or any of the six or seven decent Spanish newspapers. Its opinion pages are a sad joke, restricted to an embarrassingly narrow range of acceptable opinions (moronic right-wingery to mushy centrism, for the most part). El Pais regularly publishes excellent op ed pieces from people ranging from Communism to Thatcherism; you may find in the same issue articles from Chomsky and Vargas Llosa. And though El Pais has its own biases, an act of self-censorship remotely comparable to the supression of the Chinese Embassy bombing report from the Observer would be unthinkable.
And they have the balls to charge you $1.00 for it.
Enrique
>
>
> Regards,
> Dave Dorkin
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