The New York Times wraps up the recent Paris hotel fire story in the way the New York Times will (Craig S. Smith, "Hotel Fire Sheds Light on France's Illegal Immigrants") .

It's a tragic but hardly extraordinary tale: an intoxicated night watchman and his girlfriend inadvertently light a hotel ablaze, killing twenty-four residents in the process, many of them pending asylum cases.

A sad story, to be sure. But an instructive one? The Times thinks so...

"But the tragedy has thrown light on more than the uncertain safety of the cramped one-star hotels that dot this city. It has also illuminated a dim corner of Europe's broader illegal immigration debate: what to do with the Continent's swelling tide of undocumented aliens, known in France as 'sans papiers.'

[...] Aicha Alouache, 40, is part of that netherworld. Looking like a middle-class housewife, with neatly coiffed hair and faux pearl earrings, she said she and her husband had moved to France from Algeria three years ago 'to live better'.

Her family has moved through nearly 10 different hotels since then. 'There are times when it's time to go home and I have to think, "Where do I live?" ' she said, sitting outside yet another hotel.

Ms. Alouache said her asylum request was refused last year and is pending appeal. She is angry that she still has no papers, but she said she was not about to go back to Algiers. Here, her son, Mohamed, 4, attends a public nursery school, and her family gets 100 euros a month, as well as food, clothing, housing and free medical care from the state.

Until the fire, she spent her days in city parks with friends, waiting for her son to get out of school while her husband, 42, played soccer and acted as an informal coach for boys. She and her husband are not allowed to work, but many illegal immigrants do.

Like most European countries, France rarely resorts to deportation, so people like Ms. Alouache hang on, often for years."

Ms. Alouache, interviewed outside her new hotel, continues to receive government benefits -- including free food, clothing, housing, medical care, education for her child, and a stipend -- on an indefinite basis while awaiting a decision that may never be made. As she does so, her husband plays soccer in the park.

Shocking, really.

The sad truth, ignored by the Times, is that Paris' cheap hotels are full, not just with failed asylum seekers, but also with the successful kind. Indeed, the city, as anyone who lives here can tell you, is literally bursting at the seams with immigrants.

So what's to be learned from the recent fire? Little or nothing. As every report has confirmed, the building that burnt down was up to specs. Another building might have done the same thing that night, and for the same reasons. That many of those who died also happened to have been asylum seekers is, from a forensic point of view, strictly incidental.

And from a journalistic point of view?

This is hardly the first time the Times has filtered European news through the lens of its domestic political concerns -- in the present case, its morbid obsession with politically correct migration narratives. It would be bad enough if such narratives merely obscured the facts of the matter (which they do). But they've also come to supplant, in the Times' reporting, what locally passes for the actual concerns of the people living in a given country. I give you just two examples -- here and here -- neither of which have been reported by the Times (at least not accurately), both of which have received extensive treatment in the French press over the past two months.

Either the Times has some very bad reporters or it's not taking its job very seriously. I suspect both are the case.

There's a basic failure here, and it exceeds the failure of Times' reporters to accurately report breaking news. It's the failure of an entire culture at the paper. And it's time that editors start thinking about it. The world's a complicated place; not everywhere's New York and not every story is a plausible proxy for editors' favorite domestic stumping points.

There's no doubt much to be learned from the Times' overseas coverage. Precious little of it, however, has to do with life overseas.