Understanding Shmoos, and why US reporting on Europe is crummy

Yesterday Gates of Vienna published another lively discussion involving a Pundita post, or rather it involves Baron Bodissey's published response to my post, which was a response to his earlier post, which was a response....

Baron's The Forest, the Shmoos, and Pundita addresses several topics. Here I focus on Baron's analysis of why so much is 'lost in translation' when Americans try to follow events on the Other Side of the Pond:

A preoccupation with celebrity political personalities and the “horse race” was made evident this past week in the wake of the Italian elections. The vote was a major Southern European electoral earthquake, with its epicenter in Tuscany and Lombardy, but leaving the entire region rippling with aftershocks.

The Greens and the Communists — the Italian branch was at one time the largest Communist Party in Europe — lost their representation, and the Lega Nord scored an amazing success. But what did the American press see?

“Berlusconi Back in Office”

Berlusconi is just an afterthought in all this, the tip of an enormous iceberg of change. But to the American MSM, it’s the horse race that counts, and nothing but the horse race, all day, every day.

Ah, the glorious American two-party system of politics, which greatly distorts the US media's view of the world outside America's door!