The News Business — May / June 2007
Superiority Complex
Why the Brits think they’re better
By Susan HansenThe British press corps ought to be feeling pretty good about some of the acclaim it’s gotten here lately. What UK reporter wouldn’t relish the media column cbs News recently posted praising the British talent for ”tough interviewing,”marked by ”sharp questions”and a ”relentless probing for clarity”?
Not to mention the kudos the Brits got after a White House press conference late last year, when the bbc’s Nick Robinson bluntly asked President Bush if he might be in denial about the escalating violence in Iraq.
”Long live the British press!”declared Dan Froomkin in his White House Watch column for The Washington Post. ”In contrast to the small-bore questions American reporters posed,”wrote Froomkin, Robinson and another British correspondent had both ”cut right to the central issue of the president’s credibility.”
Those Brits, added the Chicago Tribune’s Frank James on his paper’s blog site, ”sure have a suave way of asking the impertinent questions.”
No bleeding doubt about it, the bbc and other high-end British news outlets have been making their presence felt here. Not just media critics, but a host of political bloggers have pointed to the Brits’ more skeptical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war and wondered why can’t American reporters be more impertinent, why can’t they ask sharper questions–why, in short, can’t they be more Brit-like.
Those same bloggers have been regularly linking to stories by the likes of The Guardian, The Independent, and The Times of London, driving waves of U.S. traffic to their Web sites. Since 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war, British news outlets have managed to lure in millions of U. S. readers. The bbc, for instance, claims that about 5 million Americans a month clicked onto its news site last year. The Times, for its part, says its Web site averaged 3.3 million American viewers a month, while The Guardian says it drew about 4.5 million monthly.
Not everybody regards this as a good thing. Accuracy in Media, the conservative media watchdog group, for one, is no fan of the bbc, whom it has accused, along with the left-leaning Guardian, of trying to undermine the U.S. media and ”infect America’s national psyche.”
That sort of antipathy isn’t putting off the Brits. To the contrary, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has been beefing up his U.S. reporting staff in a bid to drive still more Americans to his paper’s Web site. The bbc has even grander plans: last spring, in its first deal with a U.S. cable operator, it secured air space with Long Island-based Cablevision–enabling it to beam bbc World, its 24-hour news channel, into more than two million New York City-area homes. bbc World ceo Richard Sambrook says it has since been negotiating with other U.S. cable operators, and hopes more deals will follow. In the meantime, the bbc is making a direct play for younger U.S. viewers with a new partnership to feed bbc World news clips (along with the network’s entertainment fare) to YouTube.
Like The Guardian’s Rusbridger and Robert Thomson, editor of The Times, Sambrook is convinced there’s an audience in the U.S. hungry for high-quality, sophisticated global news coverage–the very brand of journalism, it so happens, they think they provide.
While The Financial Times has struggled to make its U.S. print edition profitable, The Economist has certainly shown that a high-end British publication can thrive here. Not only has its North American readership been growing–as of last December its circulation was 639,000, up 12 percent from 2005–but it recently landed a spot on Adweek’s 2007 ”Hot List,”right up there with other sizzling ad buys like Martha Stewart Living and Oprah’s O. Not bad, says Paul Rossi, The Economist’s North American publisher, for a 162-year-old London-based weekly.
Having recently surveyed the American landscape, the bbc’s Sambrook is confident that his network’s breadth and depth in international coverage gives it a real competitive edge. He’s hardly the first to point out what’s happened to global news here–namely that the top three broadcast networks (and for that matter many big newspapers and newsweeklies) have shuttered many overseas bureaus and shrunk the hole for international stories. In contrast, the bbc ”decided to go in the other direction,”says Sambrook, and has been bolstering its foreign coverage, with nearly five dozen bureaus around the world.
What’s more, it likes to give reporters enough air time to tell their stories. ”We tend to let people speak a bit longer and complete a sentence,”says Richard Porter, bbc World’s head of news. ”I know that’s kind of unfashionable in the U.S.”
It’s not as though Americans who want global news don’t have options here at home. The New York Times, with a staff of more than forty foreign correspondents, certainly offers a healthy quotient of international stories, as do National Public Radio, pbs, and (though some say it has slipped) CNN. Still, at least in the view of the bbc’s Porter and others, even quality U.S. outlets don’t offer as broad a range of opinion and perspective as the British press. Porter argues that one big reason U.S. readers have flocked to the bbc’s Web sites is that they’re seeking a fresh, non-U.S.-centric take on world events.
Those who clicked on to The Guardian, The Independent, or the bbc in the months before the Iraq invasion definitely got another point of view–in sum, those outlets were running stories questioning the case for war, while, as more than one U.S media critic has noted, the vast majority of the American press was not.
The Guardian’s Rusbridger says he doesn’t want to make inflated boasts for British reporters. All the same, he admits that ”there’s been a fairly widespread feeling, bordering on self-satisfaction, that the British press had acquitted itself better than their American counterparts.”
1 | 2
Subscribe Today
