Don’t you hate it when newspaper editorial writers presume to lecture us on what needs to be done — especially when they’re on the losing side? The New York Times today has the gall (no pun intended) to lecture Nicolas Sarkozy on what he needs to do for France, the nation he now leads no thanks to The Times‘ slavering over his defeated opponent:
A graduate of a non-elite university, and the son of a Hungarian immigrant, he won this week’s election promising sweeping change to voters impatient with their country’s long economic and diplomatic decline. But to succeed, Mr. Sarkozy will need to keep his own impatience, and his destructive penchant for divisive rhetoric, under firm control. …
Mr. Sarkozy will especially have to overcome the distrust of young urban immigrants, whom he has demeaned with insulting stereotypes and frightened with simplistic law-and-order prescriptions.If Mr. Sarkozy means what he now says about being “president of all the French,†he needs to recognize that there are many equally legitimate ways of being French. And that the problems of poverty and unemployment require much broader solutions than simple law and order.
This habit of editorial writers, those “cigarette-burn-in-the-tie” guys (as a friend of mine used to call them back when you could smoke in a newsroom) who are too long in the tooth to man a beat on the street, to lecture people who actually work in the trenches is annoying. It’s especially annoying when the advice is so predictable and one-sided. “You may have won, Sarko, but here’s the skinny from people who know!”
it doesn’t just happen at The New York Times. Our local papers can be just as annoying, especially when they harrumph when things don’t go their way.
