France: The Writer/Reader Divide
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 04.28.03 | 3:21 PM ET
A fellow travel writer sent an e-mail to me Monday. “Just when I thought I was getting really depressed, I came across this,” she wrote. She included a link to a recent column written by the reader representative of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The representative explained that the newspaper had heard from a number of readers complaining about the Travel section’s recent coverage of France. A typical reader remark quoted in the column: “We were appalled to see the Travel section last Sunday promoting France as a place to travel with it being so anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and opportunistic a country.” And that was just the beginning. “Jeez,” my friend concluded in her e-mail. “Hope you are weathering this silliness better than I am.”
I wish I could say I am, but I’m probably not. I just don’t understand the logic. If I made foreign travel decisions based on whether a country’s government always agreed with my politics, I’d probably never leave home. When will this end?
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
