As an example of media obtuseness, the emphatic adversatives in the New York Times’s headline to Fox Butterfield’s classic story of 1997—“Crime Rates are Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling: More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime”—take some beating. The Times itself tried to top it six years later with a variation on the same theme as Mr. Butterfield resumed his sleuthing to probe the mystery of the “researchers” who had made the “surprising” discovery of a 2.6 percent annual increase in the prison population while, at the same time, “serious crime had fallen.”

Since then, those same clueless researchers must have turned their attention to foreign attitudes towards America, as they have produced a new contender for Mr. Butterfield’s crown—also, naturally enough, from one of his colleagues at the newspaper of record. On the first day of December the Times deigned to notice the following: “World Falls for American Media, Even As It Sours on America.” Correspondent Tim Arango went on to write in full paradoxical mode: “In the last eight years, American pop culture, already popular”—hmm, do you suppose that’s why they call it “pop”?—“has boomed around the globe while opinions of America itself have soured.”

Gee, how weird is that? Could there be any ideas around about how to explain the mystery of enthusiastic consumers of American pop culture who have developed negative ideas about America? Well, I have one. Perhaps neither Mr. Arango nor his editors are frequent enough consumers of American