This just in from the NYTimes: Americans like loud noises and big roads

The New York Times is not a paper of subtlety, at least when it profiles anything outside of America.  I first noticed this when I was conducting research for my undergraduate thesis about the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline: I read all the relevant articles from Jeffrey Gettlemen and Lydia Polgreen, and I was impressed with the ink wasted on impertinent information.  For example, in researching the pipeline, I learned that Chad is very dusty, people are very poor, Cameroon is very humid, and a lot of people are still traditional.  One of my thesis advisers strongly dislikes the NYTimes for its lazy international reporting, and my research is when I first understood the source of my professor’s frustration.

But I am now learning that the newspaper does not limit its essentializing to developing countries or Africa.  On the contrary, and, in a bizarre way, to its defense, the NYTimes plants its sweeping generalizations everywhere its reporters tread.  For example, this story about Ireland post-collapse uses the term O’Mansions, can’t stop talking about the verdant grass or quaint village, and does not miss the opportunity to talk about Guiness beer.  It all comes across as rather patronizing and shallow, a more revealing, and unwitting, criticism of the paper than the country.

Or we also learn that Germans love their rules. It all goes back to hyperinflation, Adolf Hitler, the national consciousness of pre-Bismarckian German lands, and the Cold War, and it’s summarizable with an anecdote about a red line at a pool.  It’s quite obvious, and I’m surprised I did not make the connection in high school: Germans respect rules because Hitler did a lot of bad things.  The implicit statement is that the Germans are quite peculiar in this fastidiousness, and it’s a quirk that often exceeds its usefulness.  Us Americans know how to do it: we say, “Fuck the rules, I can drive after five beers.  That crosswalk is for idiots, I’ll run in front of this oncoming truck.  Filibustering is not a legitimate procedure unless my party is in power!  I only have $30 left in my bank account? So what, damn the torpedos, I want this new jacket!”  Yea, following the rules is for pussies or countries with a traumatic history.

For old time’s sake, here is a book review from Jeffrey Gettleman of Africa’s World War.  It has received high praise in other forums, and I think Gettleman also likes it.  But it requires three paragraphs for him to even mention the book, and I am pretty sure he used those paragraphs from a previous story.  (The review only consists of twelve paragraphs.)  Aside from representing a poor use of newspaper real estate (and probably a superficial skimming of the book’s jacket, photos, and index), the three paragraphs are an anecdote about a rusted bridge, AIDS, drunken policemen, and fertile soil.  I guess this part of Africa is not dusty.

I doubt that the New York Times is unique in its stooping to lazy stereotypes and our basest views of any people.  I am only picking on this paper because I read it the most and it promotes itself as a thinking man’s paper with high editorial standards.  I have never even read a serious piece of international reporting in the USA Today, for example.  But it is precisely the New York Times vaunted (but diminishing) prestige that should force it to revel in the complexity and beauty of our world.  Instead, the paper seems to assume its readers have the critical intelligence of fifth graders excited to be reading at a seventh-grade level.