An extensive analysis of US news coverage of the French Socialist Party victories in regular elections in 1981 shows how US news media constructed a discourse of crisis. A hierarchy of discourses is identified, as are the mechanisms of nomination and exclusion, paradox and appropriation through which the discourse of crisis became dominant. Specifically, the crises for the French people and for the American government are created through a continued appropriation of the voice of the voters, who are never allowed to speak for themselves, and the construction of the French Left as inherently paradoxical. The paradoxes of depoliticized politics and non-ideological votes for the Socialists functioned to explain away the contradictions between an appropriated discourse of the people and their actions.