From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. If the American press is guilty of chasing after news, real and imagined like a pack of slobbering wolves, then bolting off suddenly for fresh prey, the European papers are more like domesticated pets, obsessively shaking the same knot of rawhide day after day, month after month.

And that obsession is American hegemony.

Joining us once again to examine the latest twist in the rawhide is UPI Chief Correspondent Martin Walker,

who says the European papers see trouble to the east and even more

trouble to the far east. Well, the European press is really obsessed with two things. One has been

the way in which they see the new North Korean nuclear crisis as casting real doubt upon the

wisdom of the Bush administration focusing upon Iraq. And the other big theme has been the European outrage at the kind of pressure that was being put upon the European Union

to bring in Turkey at its summit when it had the big enlargement, increasing the European Union by 10 new member states.

And the fear there that there is now a fox in the henhouse, an Islamic state in the heart of Europe,

or is it something more subtle than that?

Oh, it's much more subtle than that.

I mean, if you look at the French press, it's clearly all an American plot.

On the whole, the French and the German press are very, very suspicious of American and British pressure to bring Turkey into Europe.

And on the other hand, the Spanish, the Italian, the British press,

tends to support the idea of bringing Turkey in, in part,

because they see it as a way of fending off the prospect of a clash of civilizations.

And as the Times put it, by bringing in a moderate Islamic state like Turkey,

Europe shows it is not a Christian club and is open to a much wider image of the world.

You mentioned the coverage of the burgeoning North Korea nuclear crisis. And it has gotten coverage here in the

United States on page one, but surprisingly little vis-a-vis the build-up to a war with Iraq.

Does that dominate the coverage in Europe and elsewhere in the world?

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