Americans try to make entertainment out of news.

Question: Is the American approach to news different?

Philippe Cayla: What does that say about our respective cultures? I think the U.S. is more of a consumer society than Europe because our history is more conscious of the historical and political environment, more weary of what may happen in other neighboring countries. The U.S., you are like in a “happy island”, you know? So you don’t need to know so much about what is going on in the rest of the world. And as a result, tragic events like September 11th cause … I think September 11th has very much marked the spirits here in the U.S., but it has created some kind of monopoly in its international news. You get … all of what you get is related to September 11th and to the terrorism issue. And there’s not much about other international political issues. Well in Europe, of course, we didn’t have September 11th, but we had some terrorist actions as you saw recently in Scotland and in London. So there is some terrorism, so we are conscious of that. But … and of course, there is something, we put it on breaking news and report on that. But we know that is a difficult background. And we know that this background is not going to be … very rapidly. And so our political agenda is not monopolized by that. We have a more diverse approach to international news, and we try to cover more international political stories, I would say.

Recorded on: 7/2/2007