Mr MacCrone told me, “I hate to be portrayed in my words,” and after complaints from readers and angry calls from Mr MacCrone’s office fees, the Financial Times took the article off the internet – something spokeswoman Christina Erickson said she had never done before. Can’t remember release. The next day, the newspaper published a letter from Mr. Macron attacking Mr. K.’s article.
In late October, Politico Europe also deleted an op-ed article entitled “The Dangerous French Religion of Secularism”, which was requested by the French sociologist. The piece sparked a firestorm of critics saying the author was blaming the victim of terrorism. But the hasty deletion prompted the author to complain of “complete censorship”. Stephen Brown, editor-in-chief of Politico Europe, said the timing of the article was inappropriate after the attack, but he apologized to the author for taking it down without elaborating. He did not cite any specific errors. He said it was also the first time that politicians had ever taken down an opinion article.
But French complaints go beyond those opinion articles and call into question cautious journalism or government policy. A Washington Washington analysis of the skepticism of his Paris correspondent, James M. Cowley, “France seeks to ‘reform Islam’ instead of fighting systemic racism.” The government “aims to influence the 1,400-year-old faith.” Doesn’t fit nicely. In the Times’ opinion page, the idiot asked by an op-ed, “Does France fuel fuel by trying to prevent Muslim terrorism?”
And then, of course, there are tweets. The Associated Press deleted a tweet asking why France provokes anger in the Muslim world, saying it is a choice of weak words for an article expressing anger at France in the Muslim world. The New York Times was baked for the headline on Twitter and in the pages of Le Monde – which appeared briefly amid the chaos of the beheading – “French police shoot and kill man after a deadly knife attack on the street.” The Times headline quickly changed as French police confirmed the details, but the screenshot remained the same.
“It looks like we were in the smoke ruins of Ground Zero and they said we were coming,” Mr Macron’s spokeswoman, Ann-Sophie Bradley, complained to Le Monde.
As any observer of American politics knows, real differences in values can make it difficult to reconcile theater aggression and Twitter screaming. Mr. Macron argues that there are big questions at the center of this matter.
“There is a kind of misunderstanding about what the European model is, and especially the French model,” he said. “American society used to separate before moving to the multiculturalist M.D., which is about the coexistence of different races and religions next to each other.”
