From WNYKRs in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Dalget Daliwal sitting in for Brook Gladstone.

For the past two weeks, a growing tally of burnt-out cars in France like a war zone body count has been repeated in the media like a mantra.

The riots began in the Paris suburbs, but then spread throughout France

and initiated copycat attacks in Germany and Belgium. The anger is blamed on the deaths of

two Parisian youths who died while being chased by police. Susan Kasky has been looking at the

coverage from around the world for The Week magazine.

And she joins me now. Susan, welcome back to OTM.

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Well, let's start with the coverage in France.

How were French papers reacting to the violence at the beginning of the week?

And how did the coverage actually evolve?

There was very little commentary initially.

It was all news coverage.

And then when the commentary started to come out, it focused on the political ramifications

of the riots.

The Figuero, Liberation, and Le Monde were talking about the rivalry between the prime

minister, Dominique de Villepin, and the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.

So it really seemed like they were treating it as just another kind of theater on which this political rivalry could play out.

One commentary in a German paper in the Frankfurt Rundschau took the French media to task.

A commentary there said, it is as if the intra-party quarrel over who should

succeed Sharak were really more significant than the socio-political catastrophe, the material

...