Farewell to the NY Times Paris Bureau Chief, Whatever She's Wearing

Like many Americans overseas, my most regular source for general American written news is the New York Times online. So it’s with no regret that I read in March that Elaine Sciolino, the paper’s Paris bureau chief, was leaving her gig in France.

 

I’ve never met Ms. Sciolino and I can only applaud the access and resources available to New York Times journalists. But when it comes to the more personal journalism of Ms. Sciolino’s travel pieces they often struck me as clichéd and lacking in curiosity. I could never understand why someone whose political and international reporting showed clear, up-to-day knowledge of reports in the French and international press seemed to be getting her travel information from an old guidebook.

 

Then I read her adieu Paris piece of March 23, 2008, entitled “Guide to the French. Handle With Care,” in which Ms. Sciolino exposed her “eight lessons learned” “in five and a half years living in Paris as an American correspondent.” And I realized that the problem with her travel reports was that she’d learned very little at all.

 

It isn’t that Ms. Sciolino’s eight lessons are all wrong; some of them are even cute. Yet they are so cliché-ridden and demonstrate such limited experience among the people she's speaking about that each lesson is less revealing than the next. (Link to the eight lessons is below.)

 

In Lesson #6, for example, “Don’t Wear Jogging Clothes to Buy a Pound of Butter,” we learn that one Saturday afternoon Ms. Sciolino was embarrassed to run into the Swedish ambassador and his wife and then the deputy treasury secretary when out buying butter while wearing her track suit.

 

And when we learn in Lesson #8 "Never say 'Bon Appétit' at the start of a meal," it's clear that Ms. Sciolino has spent her time in Paris at official dinners or with decendants of the French crown because her Bon Appétit lesson is as culturally ignorant as a European journalist declaring after many years in the United States that Americans never wear baseball caps. 

  

Overall, the banality and skewed vision of Ms. Sciolino’s lessons say little about the French and much about the life of an American correspondent overseas who apparently spent five and a half years without scarcely venturing from certain confines of Paris’s sixth and seventh arrondissements.

 

You’d think, reading those lessons, that Paris was Bagdad and that for those five plus years Ms. Sciolino had been forced to do all her reporting from the Green Zone. I can only hope for her sake that she got out safely.

 

 

© 2008, Gary Lee Kraut

 

Link to Elaine Sciolino’s “A guide to the French. Handle With Care.”