Holiday wrapping–making those little year-end round-ups of news items–is a venerable journalistic tradition, like axe-grinding and source-hyping. Sometimes, as in Le Point, wraps come chunked into good/bad lists. Sometimes, as in the current Observer, they arrive all decked out like quizzes. The Germans like theirs info-heavy, like this one in Manager-Magazin, a biz journal. Mine looks like your computer monitor with words on it, like this:
Best War 2003: For the U.S., the war against terrorism. For France, the war against the U.S. For Fox, the war against CNN.
Best example of editorial mole-hilling: Olga Craig, writing for the Sunday Telegraph, breathlessly faced what she thought were “angry Iraqis” on a jeep ride into Basra a few days after the war started. The Telegraph’s eager editors gave her piece the entire top-half of the March 30 issue and even provided a hyperventilated subhead: “Olga Craig, the first British reporter in Basra, encounters the desperate but hostile people of a city whose only word of greeting seems to be: ‘Enemy’.” You had to read through a pile of overwrought travel-writing before you realized the paper’s decision to lead with the story had been based entirely on Craig’s one-word, drive-by exchange with an anonymous pedestrian. She also saw an Iraqi soldier throw a tomato into the street. It was terrifying.
Covering the initial phases of a war is difficult–not for reporters, but for editors. Reporters, driving around in jeeps, surrounded by fireworks both real and imagined, can write their bleeding hearts out, even if nothing much is happening. In the Angolan civil war, I rode along when groceries and hardware were being delivered to Cuban army units stationed in isolated provincial outposts. Nothing happened, but that didn’t stop me from milking a whole chapter in a book out of the deal. You can’t blame a guy–or even Olga Craig–for typing. But to fabricate an entire front-page lead out of Craig’s cinematic gossamer is the work of an editor who’s not only asleep at the wheel, but also dreaming.
Best Profile in Political Cowardice: That would be the side view of despised French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. France is the poor man of Old Europe these days because nobody in the country works more than a 35-hour week and because pensions are structured in such a way that national economic bankruptcy is guaranteed by the state. Raffarin pledged to reform the system, but in the face of some of the lamest, most desultory strikes in modern French history, described dutifully in Libération, he backed down in the face of declining poll support. His apparent strategy: According to Le Monde, the creation of 38,000 new bureaucrats. The result of all this, of course, is even less public support. The French government is now hated by the French even more than it is hated by Americans.
Best Euro-Blog 2003: Depending on my mood and theirs, Innocents Abroad, Merde in France, and Oxblog, among many others.
Best use of unilateral intervention in a foreign war: French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin’s gambit in commandeering a French Air Force plane, loading it with a few medics, a security unit from the French foreign intelligence service (DGSE) and one of his own senior aides, and flying the thing to the Brazilian-Colombian border–without bothering to ask Brazilian authorities, or even his own government, for permission to do so. Monsieur Multipolarité’s plan? To pick up an old family friend, Ingrid Betancourt, who had been abducted by Colombian FARC guerrillas, as part of a deal that would have provided medical care to an ailing terrorist leader. According to reports in Le Monde and in the Brazilian press, when the Brazilians expressed outrage and demanded to board the aircraft, Villepin’s man claimed diplomatic immunity for the plan and its contents. When the story broke, Villepin quickly arranged his cover with French president Jacques Chirac and then defaulted to French form: They retreated and Villepin apologized to the Brazilians.
Best example of British lad making good in the New World: Well, the “lad” part may not stick for long, but Jonathan Spottiswoode, the sometime film-maker, oft-time rocker, and frontman for the astonishing, brilliant Spottiswoode and His Enemies, shows what happens when you import six feet of British wit, then decorate it with American cool. Worst example: Sam Leith, the Telegraph’s latest kid in New York. Note to Sam: Predictable contrariness on a guy who’s just turning 30 looks not-so-faintly ludicrous, like smoking a pipe and wearing a grown-up’s hat. Leith’s targets so far: George Bush, the war in Iraq and, yawn, most recently, the Honours List and the Lord of the Rings. The late Michael O’Donoghue, whose unpredictable, highly dangerous humor inspired the first generation of Saturday Night Live writers, once told me he thought that the dumbest jokes in the world were jokes about the Church. Not only were they all predictable, he said, but they were too safe to be funny. Take a risk, Sam–the way you used to when you were even younger.
Best to remember: 15, 000 elderly French citizens died last August because of family neglect and governmental incompetence. One. Five. Zero, zero, zero.
Best review of a minor essayist: The dead trees mercilessly slaughtered and exploited by thick-waisted, thin-skinned Michael Moore are wadded, chucked and trash-canned by the Guardian’s David Aaronvitch.
Best rant by a minor novelist: “I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world,” wrote Margaret Drabble in the Telegraph last May. “I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn’t been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn’t be here, and none of this would have happened.” She has a point there. Drabble’s dribble was one in a series of springtime rants by autumnal British and American novelists and playwrights, including Harold Pinter and Normal Mailer.
Most umbrage taken–but not paid for: Leftwing German MEP Martin Schulz accused incoming Euro-president Silvio Berlusconi of being a crook. Berlusconi’s comeback was to make a lame joke about how well Schulz would fit into the cast of Hogan’s Heroes. That, suggested liberal German dailies like the Suddeutsche Zeitung, was a kind of war crime. The paper reported that Mr. Schulz, who is widely known for throwing incendiary remarks around, had to be “soothed” by a compassionate colleague. Schulz has fully recovered.
Best worst: The BBC is the worst in this best of all possible media planets. The Beeb’s grotesque old-Labour bias and blatant anti-Americanism continues apace, despite the mismanagement of the Corporation by Greg Dyke and his sidekicks, all of whom rested the credibility of the BBC on the quality of Andrew Gilligan’s slipshod reporting, captured here by the Guardian. Runner-up: France 3, where comedians cut-up by dressing like rabbis and giving the Nazi salute, then, according to the IHT, yelling “Isra-Heil!”
The worst’s best: If you wish to get good, informed information from the BBC, the only reasonable place to go is BBC2’s Top Gear, just ending it’s third season on the air. O.K., it’s a car show, and, true, Americans may not get much from the program’s test drives of automobiles known only to readers of Hemming’s Motor News. But it is the best informational program on the BBC–better than all the science shows; flashier than the prize-less, often clueless quiz programs; shorter than all the historical drivel; smart, funny, well-written, and subversively un-P.C. Recently, when the program was bumped back a bit on the Sunday night lineup without much notice, presenter Jeremy Clarkson tried to regain the BBC’s favor by offering to rename the show The Nelson Mandela Car Show while series regulars James May and Richard Hammond ostentatiously read copies of the leftwing Guardian and flashed their New Age sandals. One recent program had British scientists doing tire burns–”the smartest men in Britain doing the dumbest thing known to man” or something similar–and another was devoted to testing the durability of a Toyota pickup–the sort of trucks that, fitted with a set of wooden grates, serve as public transport in much of Africa. The Toyota was bought used for a song, and looked it. It was then driven into a tree, down a set of concrete steps, tied to a boat ramp, washed out to sea, left on the sandy beach when the tide went out, and set afire. After each event, the truck started up and ran. Finally, the thing was parked atop a high-rise building, which was then demolished. When the dust cleared, the Toyota drove off into legend. Fantastic. Just watching it all happen made me want to rush out and catch a third-world bus. To Paris.
Best wishes: For a happy 2004.
–Denis Boyles writes the weekly EuroPress Review column for NRO.