Baffling note in the Village Voice today: David Ng offers an increasingly insupportable series of assertions about French riots. The article, headlined "CNN Got It Wrong" starts with the proposition that the events have been wildly overreported in the United States. To put it decorously, what the fuck? I watched CNN relentlessly as the riots leapt from Aulnay-sous-Bois and St-Denis to, let me check, 300 other towns and further into Paris proper...and CNN gave me lengthy, multipart reports of a convict who escaped and was shortly caught. He was drunk! What CNN dope I got about French events came almost entirely from a tiny and occasional crawl across the bottom of the screen; when they actually provided on-camera coverage, it was to reassure Americans that tourists were safe. In what reality does this count as "American media hyperbole," in its coverage of two weeks of riots that have drawn a curfew devised during the Algerian War and state of emergency, and were replete not just with car burnings but numerous other manifestations including an attempt to batter into a police station with a presumably unlit vehicle? Moreover, since when does the US news exaggerate civilian unrest directed against the state? Generally they do the exact opposite, playing down anti-state action in every western-style capitalist nation. This time, David Ng is helping. Here, by the way, are some French dailies and journals, which would presumably have better facts than the allegedly hysterical US rabble-mongers, and thus conform more closely with Ng's local account.
But this is not the end of the bizarrerie; it's just the beginning. Though the authority of his note is derived entirely from his presence—he's in a café in Paris!—the main fact of his presence is his absence. He determines the importance of the events not by going to the action, but by not going to it; his decision to take a pass on the largest civil unrest in France in 40 years is justified by the fact that it was really just a tempest in a teapot, though this is concluded not before he decides to hang out downtown, but after. "But now," he writes, "with the riots finally winding down, the café culture's reluctance to engage the riots—its choice of distance (or what the French call recul) seems the right response to the events of the past two weeks."
There's a name for that logic, I think. Or, to pose it another way, Ng takes his subjective opinion for objective history: I didn't care what was happening; nothing happened. But surely when a reader encounters a reporter whose account of thousands and thousands of poor and colored kids, spread across a nation, burning cars and battering police stations is, in brief, nothing to see here, move along, pay no attention to the news behind the curtain, that reader might find him- or herself a bit skeptical, no?
Posted by jane at November 11, 2005 06:46 PM | TrackBack