“The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media’s reaction to France and Germany’s intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called ‘respectable’ press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical – one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as ‘Hitler’s children’. “
Thanks for the link, Jim. I think it’s a little dangerous to generalize from the statements presented in this article. NewsMax is hardly a mainstream American news source — it’s a sleazy tabloid (as kuro5hin notes); its home page does feature links to news and commentary, but on the same menu bar is a link to transcripts of the jokes made by late-night talkshow hosts. Should America judge all of British journalism according to what the trashiest UK gossip rags publish? Further, I would guess that, in light of recent global events, more people are spending more time reading news online. The article does not investigate how much traffic from US readers may have increased at US news sites. I also wonder whether GoogleNews is introducing more US readers to a wider array of news s0urces. I know that before GoogleNews, I read the online sites for USA Today every day, CNN when I wanted updates, and The Washington Post when I wanted backgrounds. Now I only check those pages when I’m bored, because GoogleNews serves up a broader range of fresher news — and I’m definitely reading more news from the UK. This time frame also includes a time period when a bunch of major US newspapers started requiring user logins, which means I am less likely to link to those sources. If UK papers are less likely to require user registration (and I don’t necessarily know that they are), then I’m more likely to link to them, and return to them. I think it’s important to note that the above story was published by a commercial site for UK online journalists.
