Newsweek Blunder

Must Newsweek magazine — one of the stars of the American press, so often shown as an example in our country — sink so low as to have such a front page this week? A photo of President Nicolas Sarkozy, with a rather distrustful expression, to illustrate this title: “A New Extremism in Europe.”

Newsweek is losing steam. It needs readers. But must it resort to journalistic prostitution? It’s true that the French press has not been very nice to George Bush, to say the least. Americans, annoyed at this, are now finding a way to get revenge.

Easy and dishonest: first, because the writer of the article is neither a journalist nor an American, but a working deputy in Great Britain. Denis MacShane delivers his opinion, one of a man who hasn’t liked France for quite a long time.

Next, this front page doesn’t correspond at all to the inside three-page article, which is dedicated rather to the emergence of the far right into the Swedish parliament. Only a few lines are reserved for the French political situation, and to the expulsion of the Gypsies. It really is robbery. Where’s the information?

True, things aren’t exactly perfect in France, and Sarkozy has a lot of faults. But to make him look like an extremist really rings of the same “over-the-top” business as those who said, not long ago, that Bush was worse than his enemy, Saddam Hussein.