What's French for 'The New York Times'?

The French president goes on a collision course with the Gray Lady

Ben Smith, the New York Times’s media columnist, took on La Republique this week with a column about French President Emanuel Macron. To sum up the column, Smith is unhappy about Macron’s pushback against the Times for “legitimizing” terror through its coverage of the recent beheading of a French teacher by a radical jihadist.

Smith is clearly non-plussed by the accusation, especially coming from Macron, a commanding political figure of the international left. The Times columnist’s displeasure is evident in his language. The piece—oddly published in French as well, the first column of his, or any other in recent memory to be offered to U.S. audiencesin another language, in addition to English—begins with Smith noting that Macron has “some bones to pick” with the Times “‘bias’” (which Smith puts in scare quotes). Smith notes that Macron has called from his “gilded palace” in order to “drive home a complaint.”

This, clearly, is not the language of a reasoned consideration but of confrontation. Smith wants the readers to know exactly what he thinks about Macron’s impetuous attempt to “drive home a complaint”—and, by extension, what the reader should think too.

We have to pause here for a moment to reflect on this scenario and all that it implies. Think about this: the head of state of a major world power, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, a nuclear power, and the world’s seventh largest economy is going tête-à-tête not even with the Times’ publisher or editor (something that has occurred frequently in the past) but its media columnist.

On the face of it, that represents a ridiculous imbalance of power. In the cinematic version of this encounter, the president of the World Power would make some gesture to an aid, who would have the story killed. And that is indeed what happened with two other pieces, one by Politico EU and another by the Financial Times, which, as Smith notes in his own column, were scrubbed after Macron got a little désagréable.

Not so with the Times, which not only ran this piece by Smith but kept all of its reporting online and intact, as far as I can tell.

Anyone who thinks the Times’ influence is diminished would do well to consider this episode. The Times not only went toe-to-toe with a man who has his finger on the button (at least one of the fingers not on a croissant), but actually won. That is remarkable.

But it’s important we look at the merits of Macron’s claims. At the outset, the Times’ coverage of the slaying of the French teacher, who had shown the famous/infamous Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his class as part of a civics lesson, was problematic. The first headline on the news piece about the murder read:

“French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street.”

That’s an interesting construction. It doesn’t take a Chomskyan linguist to point out that the subject of the sentence will receive the weight of its meaning. The way the Times built the headline puts that focus on the French Police who, according to the headline, didn’t “stop” or “neutralize” but instead opted to “shoot.” The person the French police shot was not a “terrorist” nor “terror suspect” or “alleged assailant” but a man.

In the current cultural climate, the police shooting of a man is only one thing: bad. The problems with the headline abound, including the decision to use the phrase “After a Fatal Knife Attack,” which doesn’t connect the man shot by police to the attack. For all a reader would know, there was a knife attack and the French police shot someone unrelated after the attack took place. Perhaps the “victim” of the French police was an innocent black man. Who knows.

Except the Times should have known better. While Smith avers that the headline was “quickly” changed, it only begs the question as how that headline was created in the first place. Unlike a previous fracas involving a headline related to the way the paper characterized a speech by Trump, in which case Times held a town hall to address the issue, no deep bouts of journalistic self-examination or navel gazing were undertaken.

But this is not the end of the story. In the days after the “shooting” of the man by French police, the Times published at least four more pieces about the terror attack. They were:

• An Oct. 19 news analysis piece entitled “After Teacher’s Decapitation, France Unleashes a Broad Crackdown on ‘the Enemy Within’”

• A broader look at the state of affairs in France, “A Teacher, His Killer and the Failure of French Integration,” which ran on Oct. 26

• “Muslim Countries Denounce French Response to Killing of Teacher, Urge Boycott,” published Oct. 27

• And a provocatively-titled opinion piece, “Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying to Prevent It?” on Oct. 31.

At a glance, it’s not difficult to see why Macron had a “bone to pick” with the Times. The coverage was a barrage.