Listening to this week’s On the Media on the way home today, it was suddenly very jarring to realise the real difference between US media and its British equivalent.
In a piece about in-fighting between the English language Miami Herald and its sister newspaper El Nuevo Herald, one of the main differences between the papers was the complete objectivity that the Miami Herald, like most major newspaper across America, adopt at all times. El Nuevo Herald, on the other hand, takes positions on things all the time. Much like Latin American newspapers as well as European ones. Indeed, all British newspapers have fairly obvious positions on a wide range of beliefs.
Meanwhile, the next item “celebrated” the tenth anniversary of Fox News, a cable news station that is absolutely not objective. Yet compare and contrast with our own news stations, and there’s nothing remotely close. Of course broadcasting laws in this country prevent such a station from happening – and in any case, Sky News has tried on more than one occassion to make Richard Littlejohn some kind of British Bill O’Reilly without success.
But it’s curious to me that there isn’t an American version of, say, the Daily Mail. I wouldn’t wish the paper on my worst enemies, but in a land of free speech, one might expect a USA Today type operation selling such a title quite successfully. Of course the New York Times and LA Times are seen as “liberal” papers anyway, so perhaps a Guardian wouldn’t flourish at the other extreme, but the differences are still curious.