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From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

President Bush was on tour this week through Europe, stopping off in Belgium, Germany, and Slovakia,

meeting with heads of state, trying hard to bridge a transatlantic gap that has grown ever wider in recent years

because of what several key European nations see is American arrogance on issues ranging from the Iraqi invasion to global warming.

So we take our own tour of Europe now by way of the foreign press this week with Susan Caskey, contributing editor of the week

magazine. Susan, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be here. So there's been a lot of

initial comment on the mere presence of President Bush in Europe, a part of the world he is

perceived to have snubbed. What's the reaction there? Were the editorials, I'll give you a choice.

Appreciative, tentative, or indifferent?

Well, they certainly were not indifferent. There was an element of appreciative.

In Le Figuero, a conservative French paper, there was a commentary by Pierre-Russ-Land, where he said,

Bush has finally discovered Europe. The idea, Le Figuero, and a couple of German papers,

is that before Bush knew that there

were different European countries, but the EU as an institution that he would have to work with,

they felt like he hadn't really acknowledged. But on the other hand, what was different this

time around in the reaction to President Bush was kind of a self-deprecating tone in several of the editorials that we normally see in Canadian papers but haven't generally seen in European papers.

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