"Paris is burning, civil war, war zone, race riots -- the headlines, especially on TV, often have no nuance."

That's one of many complaints by the French about the bad press it's been getting. Your country is going to hell and you're begging for nuance:

The conservative Le Figaro was indignant about the way U.S. media reported from riot-hit areas such as Seine Saint Denis, the rundown area between the capital and its Charles de Gaulle airport to the north.

"American newspapers don't hesitate to compare Paris to Baghdad or Seine Saint Denis to the Gaza Strip and to call the crisis a 'Katrina of social disasters'," an editorial fumed in a reference to the recent hurricane.

I wonder how much nuance there was in Le Figaro's reports about Katrina.

Other commentators objected to the way foreign media stress the ethnic backgrounds of the rioters and the racial discrimination they complain about -- issues less prominent here because France officially does not recognise it has minority communities.

Aspirational? Or too convenient?

But the critics were not without self-criticism.

Le Figaro said the riots were "too good an opportunity to pass up, an opportunity to mock the country that claims to have invented human rights and that's always ready -- yes, it's true -- to lecture the rest of humanity."