Coverage of yesterday’s invasion of the US Capitol by Trump supporters has since led news reports the world over.

In the UK, The Guardian referred to the invaders as a “mob.” So did the BBC, in recent coverage, though at least one earlier report called them “Trump supporters”—a phrase widely used in other outlets, including the Times of London, Australia’s Herald Sun, and Canada’s Toronto Star, as noted in an Axios roundup. 

Axios also noted a “pivot” in terms used by US news outlets—from calling the demonstrators “protesters” to “mobs” and “rioters.” The same pivot was visible in international coverage during the past twenty-four hours. A BBC headline from yesterday afternoon described “turmoil” at the Capitol as “violent Trump supporters breach building.” A more recent story referred to the event as a “siege,” and to its perpetrators as a “pro-Trump mob”—a term that also featured in coverage by Al Jazeera and The Mainichi, in Japan. 

Others took a different approach. The Times of India referred to the group as “stormtroopers,” while Israel’s Haaretz published the names of white supremacists who were present at the Capitol, some of whom had attended previous white-supremacist rallies. A headline from France’s Le Monde asked, “Complotistes, néonazis, négationnistes… qui sont les insurgés du Capitole?” Still, many outlets avoided such specificity. Coverage in the Folha de S.Paulo and O Globo, both in Brazil, referred respectively to “multidão,” a Portuguese word meaning “crowd,” and to the “manifestantes,” sometimes describing their costumes and weapons. Journalist Robert Moore, from Britain’s ITV News, referred to the invaders as the “pro-Trump crowd that fought with the police” when following them for a video segment that has since received over nine million views. 

Headlines consistently conjured the violent atmosphere of yesterday’s event. Some outlets, such as Daily News Egypt, quoted from comments made by President-elect Joe Biden to refer to “chaos” in headlines; others, including Mexico’s El Universal, used the word directly. A headline in the Bangkok Post referred to a “day of debate and tumult.” The Guardian and the Times of London both referred to the event, in headlines, as a “siege,” while several stories in Nigeria’s Punch termed it the “Capitol riot.” As in the US, “insurrection” featured in many headlines, from Canada’s Globe and Mail to South Africa’s Mail and Guardian.

Many outlets featured the responses of world leaders. An Al Jazeera headline led with the word “disgraceful,” in reference to quotes by both British prime minister Boris Johnson and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Punch, in Nigeria, published a roundup of responses from international government figures, including German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who urged Trump supporters to “stop trampling on democracy.” The Hong Kong Free Press, a nonprofit news site, assessed the response of pro-Beijing officials and state media, reporting that both groups “delight[ed] in comparing US Capitol unrest with [the] 2019 storming of [the] Hong Kong legislature.” 

A spokesperson for Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the day revealed “that the US electoral process is archaic,” according to the Moscow Times, which included additional comments and characterizations from several prominent Russian figures, including media personalities and political officials. President Vladimir Putin also spoke with reporters, following an Orthodox Christmas service held on an island northeast of Moscow, though, according to the Moscow Times story, he “made no statement on the unprecedented chaos in the United States.” 

The conservative headlines on the mob storming the Capitol were a head-twisting panorama of the opposing philosophies expressed in right-wing media, and reflective of the divisions in the Republican Party.

FoxNews.com posted not one but two editorials last night denouncing the mayhem, including a short piece by Karl Rove that placed a good part of the blame on Donald Trump for bringing the mob together. Both the Washington Examiner and National Review, two influential and prominent conservative websites that have been increasingly critical of Trump, came out swinging. Most notably, the Examiner called for his impeachment and removal from office. 

But several voices on the far right took a different view. Consider this headline from Infowars, posted last night: “Unarmed woman carrying Trump flag executed in U.S. Capitol building.” Big League Politics called Vice President Mike Pence a traitor for praising the police, especially after they shot a “patriotic woman dead.” American Thinker theorized that leftist provocateurs led the way into the Capitol.

And others just ignored the events. Newsmax’s usually robust opinion pages contained not one piece about the Capitol riots. The top story on its homepage the morning of January 7 had this bland headline: “Trump vows ‘orderly transition’ after ‘greatest 1st term’ in history.” The opinion pages of the Washington Times seemed stuck in time, with a lead editorial about the elections in Georgia.

It’s worth mentioning a piece of conservative satire from the outlet Babylon Bee, which invents news stories to make points in the manner of The Onion. It carried the headline: “Trump walks away from Republican party without even looking back at the explosion.” The piece made up a quote from Steve Bannon and Nancy Pelosi both saying: “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

It took the New York Times a bit over a year to go from wishy-washy headlines like “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism” to “Mob Incited by Trump Storms Capitol.” What changed?

It wasn’t Trump. He came to power claiming a prerogative to bend reality. It will be four years in a few weeks—when Joseph Biden is inaugurated as the forty-sixth president of the United States on January 20—since the first example of his presidential alternative facts: the size of the crowd at his own inauguration.

His insistence that he won an election that was not particularly close is in keeping with his approach to public life ever since he emerged as a lesser New York City real estate developer. What changed most notably yesterday is that the Times and other power centers in American politics have accepted the reality that has been staring them in the face.

The Times’ comprehensive coverage of a grim day in American democracy is to be applauded. But it, and we, must not remember today as when Trump went too far, but as the day when the Times and other arbiters finally woke up to what had been there all along.

CNN is covering a live, ongoing law enforcement crisis on Capitol Hill primarily with political pundits.

Yes, the politics are important, and the network would be remiss to ignore the root causes of today’s crisis. But we could use a more measured and technical approach to this tinderbox.

It would be nice to know why the Capitol Police failed so spectacularly this afternoon. How did the Trump supporters end up in an armed standoff? Why is it taking so long to respond? Where is Mayor Muriel Bowser?

If this happened in any other country, they’d call on one of a myriad of law enforcement experts. The choice to rely on political talking heads is not helpful.

As regular readers may know, I currently write CJR’s daily newsletter from the UK, where I’m from. (I studied and lived in the US in between times; given my 7am Eastern deadline, it’s great to now have the time difference.) While I follow CNN closely, for work purposes, it’s unusual for my friends to do likewise. This week has been an exception; in fact, it feels, from scrolling down Twitter at least, as if every politics nerd in the UK is hooked on the network, as the quadrennial Great British American Election Night Watch-along—wings, “chips,” miniature American flags, Budweiser—has turned into a sleep-deprived, multiday marathon.

Brits have fallen in love with John King, marveling at his stamina and Magic Wall. (Steve who?) Iain Martin, a columnist with The Times of London, threatened to establish a UK John King Fan Club; others demanded that King be flown in to cover elections here. Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor for former prime minister Tony Blair, praised CNN’s pundits as “articulate, clear, well-informed” (compared with the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, at any rate). The network’s coverage here has been interspersed with commercials for the same handful of CNN International shows, playing over and over again: Amanpour; First Move, with Julia Chatterley; Connect the World, with Becky Anderson; and Quest Means Business, with Richard Quest, who is now widely known here as “Maze Man,” since his ad shows him striding, expressively, through a maze. (On reaching the center, he dings a little bell and shouts “WHAT A PROFITABLE DAY!” in a Nigel Thornberry voice.) If Quest et al. are not quite household names in the UK, they are, at least, now names in my household, where my girlfriend and I speak along in time with the ads, mimicking their cadence and gestures. (Her: “What about the prospect of an IPO or is it too soon?” Me: “It all starts here, and that’s why we’re here.”)

Choose your fighter pic.twitter.com/DCLETYbK4m

— Elsie 4 YL Scotland Rep (@elsieortong) November 6, 2020

While I see CNN’s election coverage through the eyes of a US-focused media critic, my friends do not. “CNN is awesome,” one texted me, a minute after the polls closed on Tuesday. “So much flashing stuff.” Earlier today, I checked in with that friend, and a few others I know to have been watching, to see if they were still enthused. The friend from Tuesday was. “Love the pomp and ceremony and drama,” said another. “So American.” A third: “It’s just very loud, and they seem to be constantly, like… doing stuff.” A fourth excitedly told me that CNN had just displayed the logo of an adult website on the Magic Wall. I assumed this friend hadn’t actually fallen for that very obvious viral hoax, but it turned out that he had. We’re all very tired.

A more serious theme recurred among my (highly unscientific) sample, as well as among British commentators online: that CNN is refreshingly forthright and no-nonsense compared with British broadcasters in general and with the BBC in particular. “John King turns a trickle of data into a bombardment of analysis, which is a pleasant change from the jovial but ultimately pointless interviews with political has-beens and minor celebrities on British election nights,” one friend wrote me; another added, “I didn’t even like John King that much and I found the BBC coverage simplistic compared to the power of CNN.” Others said they appreciated how strongly CNN anchors have called out Trump’s fraud lies.

This analysis might seem surprising to Americans: Britain, after all, has a notoriously partisan, scabrous press. Here, though, our broadcasters tend to be more sedate and old-fashioned, generally hewing more closely than print newspapers to notions of civility and objectivity. CNN, to my mind, hews to those principles, too, but it’s generally brasher about asserting them. To oversimplify, the tone of British newspapers is more like US TV, whereas US newspapers are more like British TV.

Novelty, of course, is also important here. There would have been huge UK interest in the presidential election anyway—as well as a desire to hear about it from an American perspective—but it’s also happened to coincide with a particularly miserable, boring period in British life, straddling the start of a new, national coronavirus lockdown.

Not that everyone here has been impressed by all the flashing things. “I watched CNN election coverage for about ten hours last night and felt, at the time, loads of incredible white knuckle things were going on constantly,” Barney Ronay, a sports writer for The Guardian, tweeted earlier. “This morning it turns out nothing actually happened.” I had a similar reaction, from my strange transatlantic perch. It was not a very profitable day.

Related: How the media’s unfolding-election narrative serves Trump