Strike? What strike?

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Lack of coverage of workers' strike in France - Pundit Watch - Column

Imagine that in reaction to Republican proposals to gut Medicaid, cut back on health-care benefits for the elderly, slash aid to dependent children, and give rich people a tax cut, somewhere between four and five million Americans went on strike and staged demonstrations in cities around the country.

Imagine that they shut down subway and rail service, the post office, hundreds of schools and day-care centers, and severely curtailed airline travel.

Imagine these collective actions got the government to back off.

Pretty big story, huh? But wait - it didn't happen here (tant pis!). This happened in a foreign country where they don't even speak our language or anything, so who cares? American news executives and pundits alike know that we chuckleheads don't care about foreign countries at all - unless our vacation plans are at stake.

And so it was that during the same week that somewhere between 500,000 and 1.7 million French people took to the streets, Newsweek chose to put Elizabeth Hurley - supermodel and Hugh Grant's delightfully understanding girlfriend - on its cover. It followed up with its special "year in cartoons" issue.

For at least three weeks in a row, This Week With David Brinkley managed to go on the air without anyone uttering the words "France" or "strike" once. (On Christmas Eve, we did get to hear a recently exhumed Alexander Haig hold forth on whether Oliver Stone's Nixon was historically accurate or not, which is like interviewing the Ayatollah about the veracity of Salman Rushdie's work.)

In reaction to proposals by President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppe to cut subsidies to the national railway service and lay off a percentage of its workers, scale back national health-insurance benefits, and raise the retirement age for public employees, strikers brought transportation in Paris to a standstill, and some French cities like Marseilles experienced their most widespread social protest since the 1968 student-worker demonstrations that brought down Charles de Gaulle's government.

This was part of the ongoing, fin-de-siecle confrontation over whether national governments will continue to honor their commitments to care for everyday, ordinary people when they become unemployed or sick, or when they retire.

Yet the story was either totally ignored or told from a deficit-hawk perspective. ABC's This Week thought it was more important for us to hear from Alphonse D'Amato about Whitewater (puhleeze), and...