Cheese-eating Surrender Monkeys - Use in Journalism

Use in Journalism

Following the appearance of the phrase on The Simpsons, "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" has become widely used by journalists in the media. It was used particularly in the run-up to the war in Iraq, having been popularized by the conservative National Review journalist Jonah Goldberg to describe European and especially French opposition to military action in that war. Paul Starobin of the National Journal commented that "it fell to a pop-culturally informed conservative polemicist, National Review scribe Jonah Goldberg, to revive and popularize the insult in the prewar name-calling."

However, Goldberg first used the phrase in April 1999 with no relation to the Iraq War, as the title of a column in the National Review on the "Top Ten Reasons to Hate the French". The reasons he listed included: the French people insisting that they are "one of the Big Four victors" of World War II despite surrendering Paris to the Germans "without firing a shot"; the French denying the United States overflight rights in their airspace under the 1986 bombing of Libya; and the French wanting "nothing to do with NATO" during the Cold War.

Goldberg continued to use the phrase several times in what he has described as his "French-bashing columns". In a July 2002 National Review column, he noted that the phrase had become frequently used by other journalists and that he takes "some pride in its wide currency, as I believe I am its most successful popularizer." In this column, Goldberg discussed why hating the French had become so popular in America around that time. One of the reasons he gave was the two countries' different views on the War on Terrorism that began after the September 11 attacks. By July 2003, Goldberg commented that he was starting to lose his "taste" for writing columns that criticize the French. He added: "Oh, I haven’t lost my distaste for the French, but French-bashing is so clichéd these days, I feel like I’m doing schtick when I talk about Cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the like."

Ben Macintyre of The Times wrote in 2007 that the phrase is "perhaps the most famous" of the coinages from The Simpsons and since Goldberg's usage it "has gone on to become a journalistic cliché." Following Goldberg's popularization of the phrase, it has been used by the New York Post (as "Surrender Monkeys") as the headline for its December 7, 2006, front page, referring to the Iraq Study Group and its recommendation that U.S. soldiers be withdrawn from Iraq by early 2008. Articles in the Daily Mail have used the phrase in reference the French's "attitude problem" and the "muted" European reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden, while The Daily Telegraph has cited it in relation to Anglo-French military cooperation.