Are US MSM slow to cover French riots?

Sitting in Europe, I have been awakened to the fact of the on-going riots in Paris (see Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard, November 14, 2005, here). I wondered why I was not more aware of them - in full throttle for well over a week now - from the US MSM. Curious, I went back and looked over US newspaper coverage from the point when the riots began.

Perhaps I am overly suspicious of venues like the NYT or Washington Post, but it seems to me, at least, that both papers were very slow to pick up on the gathering violence and neither has given it the attention it deserves, even in comparison with the ever-present tendency to trash the war in Iraq and anything else available even remotely to lay at the feet of the present administration. Both papers, it seems to me, have gone out of their way in their coverage to favor criticism of the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose politically incorrect, un-multicultural stance seems to have the slightest whiff of, well, Bushism about it. Part of what I, at least, see as slow, buried, and gently biased coverage by the US press is due to not wanting to criticize Western Europe because it bears the torch against the wicked Bush administration. Part of it also is that it is does not want to show Europe's multiculturally politically incorrect response because that gives succor to anti-multiculturalism (look, even the Europeans don't buy the multi-culti line, except in international meetings of their elites trashing the Americans), which, of course, is weird because Europe has far greater problems with integration of immigrants than the US does (although, to be fair, Western Europe's immigration problems, in terms of culture, religion, etc., are far more difficult than America's).

Part of the reporting weakness, too, is that venues like the NY Times simply have the wrong kind of reporters covering the place for what it has become today - they are often reporters with little interest and less grasp of the economic and business matters that allow Europe its good life, little or no grasp of the immigration issues, and are frankly people who prefer soft cultural issues, Europe as a style-fashion beat - the kind of reporters who, faced, for example, with Merkel, can't think beyond doing a story on how she is ... female.

(The best coverage in US journalism of Western Europe continues to be, by a wide margin, Christopher Caldwell.)