The 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...

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