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 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.”
Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian’s former diplomatic editor, says he’s still perplexed by the ”spooky”way American reporters seemed to rally around Bush at the March 2003 White House press conference just before the start of the war. ”It was almost like a prayer meeting,”adds MacAskill.
Many media observers have ascribed the U.S. press’s failure to be more critical to a kind of temporary post-9/11 paralysis, and MacAskill and other British reporters say that in the past couple of years they’ve definitely seen a shift: American reporters have been putting harder questions to the White House and Pentagon and coming up with ”fantastic exclusives,”as MacAskill puts it, that challenge the official line.
That said, some things haven’t changed. American reporters still stand at White House press conferences when President Bush enters the room–something British reporters like Gerard Baker, The Times’s U.S. editor in Washington, say they would never dream of doing for Tony Blair. As a group, says Baker, the U.S. press still tends to be far more polite and deferential in their questioning of public authorities–to the point, he adds, that many of his fellow Brits regard American reporters as ”incredibly soft”and ”patsy-like.”
Robinson, the bbc reporter who asked Bush if he was in denial about Iraq, emphasizes that that’s not true of all his American colleagues. Still, he thinks the fact that his question was at all remarkable reflects a fairly fundamental cultural difference in how British and American reporters see their relationship to public officials, and how seriously they take their role as watchdogs. ”The stakes are high,”says Robinson. ”It seems to me this is about holding people to account.”
Anyone who has seen British TV interviewers go one-on-one with their local leaders could scarcely deny they take a feistier tack. Indeed, in one legendary exchange from the late 1990’s, bbc interviewer Jeremy Paxman asked an evasive government minister the same question twelve times.
There are other big cultural differences, of course. Unlike in the U.S., where journalists generally strive for at least the appearance of neutrality and balance, British papers have a long tradition of openly allying with political parties and flouting their partisan passions. Some veteran British media watchers, including U.S. expat Tom Fenton, cbs’s former London correspondent, say that has a liberating effect, which, combined with the fact that Britain still has a dozen or so national dailies battling it out for readers, makes the British press (high-end papers and tabloids alike) edgier and more fun to read.
Then again, it’s not always a good bet that all the facts underlying some of the stories they run are true. While Fenton says that British papers have come a long way from the days when Fleet Street reporters ”were dreaming up stories in pubs,”he gives the American press the clear advantage on overall reliability.
British reporters and editors are quick to concede that point. In fact, they say that on sourcing standards and professional ethics as a whole, the American press has much to recommend it. ”I actually rather admire things about it,”says The Guardian’s Rusbridger, who points to a ”calmness of tone”in U.S. papers, along with a willingness to tackle large complicated projects.
Indeed, when it comes to long-form investigative reporting, Bill Hagerty, editor of the British Journalism Review, contends that the Americans regularly ”knock the spots off”the British papers.
Of course, the Brits also see much in U.S. papers that isn’t so good. The Times editor Thomson thinks they can be ”full of air”; he claims the still cutthroat British market keeps the media there sharper, tougher, wittier, and generally more full of life. ”As a collection of papers, there’s nothing quite like the British press,”says Thomson. ”That competition brings out the best.”
All the Web hits The Times, The Guardian, and the bbc are getting in the U.S. suggest that they must be doing something right. Whether they can actually make further inroads with their target audience–affluent, educated Americans who are serious consumers of news–is a whole other question. Thomson, who says The Times is in the process of hiring advertising reps to sell Web space here, thinks it’s worth a try. So does Rusbridger, who notes that building a U.S. audience via the Web, as opposed to distributing a paper edition, which The Guardian had briefly considered doing here, is a relatively low-risk proposition.
For now, no one’s saying that British news outlets pose an urgent competitive threat. Even so, U.S. media critic Michael Wolff thinks they have attained a certain cachet and ”credibility advantage”with a high-end demographic here that could be helpful. Especially now that the Internet has given American news consumers the chance to shop around.
Susan Hansen is a freelance writer in New York.