Reporting the G-7 Economies

Americans are commonly stereotyped less interested in the outside world than other peoples--a function, some suppose, of the country's position in world affairs (its dominant status, which has others paying more attention to it than vice-versa) and more distinct features of its geography and culture (its continental scale, its being part of an already long predominant Anglosphere, its tendency to receive rather than send out immigrants, etc.).

Whether one sees the stereotype as containing any truth or not, the country's media seem to behave as if it were the case, adding a lessened attention to events in much of the world to its other biases--its preference for politics over policy, personality over material facts, narrative over nuance, and a centrist perspective squeamish about or hostile to contextualization and big-picture thinking, inclined to neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and deeply deferential to Establishment "expertise."

All this means that what coverage other countries get is of a very particular kind, as where the economic life of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized countries is concerned. It by and large approves Britain's being neoliberal trailblazer and "financial superpower" (and is much less interested in Britain's deindustrialization). It is less warm in its attitude toward Germany and Japan, but those two countries' economies are so big, powerful and dominant in their regions that the media are compelled to give them some heed--and if hewing to narratives of Eurosclerosis and Japanese "lost decades" for a long time, in the case of Germany especially, but also sometimes Japan, acknowledging manufacturing successes. (It also helps that playing up those countries' economic weight has been prominent in the American media's tendency to encourage those countries' "rearmament"--while given the campaign against China's IT sector there is no getting away from Japan's colossal profile in areas like chip-making inputs and robotics.)

By contrast there seems to me much less coverage of the other three G-7 members--France, Italy, Canada. Where the first two countries are concerned, and France particularly, it revels in neoliberal clichés about an "old Europe" of bloated governments, overgenerous welfare states, uppity, strike-happy workers, ever-low and eroding productivity and "competitiveness," and an oppressed entrepreneur class looking longingly across the English Channel, and still better across the Atlantic, toward FREEDOM! (Indeed, such cliché, which is to be found in France's own press as well as that of foreign countries, has reared its ugly head in American coverage of French protest against the raising of the country's retirement age--cliché consistently acknowledged even by those who would offer a more sympathetic take.) Italy is hazily perceived in a similar manner (the tendency to treat a whole continent as a nearly homogenous blob may not be as bad in Europe's case as in that of "Africa" or "Asia," but not as much better as one might think). Still, it is mostly ignored. And Canada is ignored even more completely--such that one has the irony of America neighboring one of the world's largest and most important economies, and its press paying almost no attention to the fact at all, such that I suspect that even Americans attentive to the relevant areas of the news know less about the economy of their own northern neighbor and North American Free Trade Agreement partner than they do any of the other countries.

Such is the "quality" of the media that centrists endlessly sing as our salvation from fake news-purveying hordes.