The view from London.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Pundit Watch - British media - Column

There's nothing like a stack of British newspapers, the BBC, and a pint of bitter to give you some perspective on the parochialism of the American news media. I write this from London, having escaped - as I understand it - endless Heidi Fleiss stories and the usual assessments of how President Bill Clinton has done in the preceding seven days.

I don't want to glorify the mainstream British press totally. After all, The Times of London is owned by the Genghis Khan of the news media, Rupert Murdoch, and the tabloids here make USA Today look like Scientific American. But with The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Evening Standard, there is a thriving newspaper culture that puts America to shame. And stories about Princess Di's latest snit or the number of British tourists who've been mugged in Miami are not the focus of these papers. Instead, what overwhelms and humbles the American reader are articles and commentary that take a much broader global and historically informed view of current events.

After immersing myself in these papers, I'm struck more than ever by the myopia and ignorance of the American pundits, who continue to insist that Washington, D.C., is the center of the universe. The British press make this ethnocentric conceit seem not just simple-minded and cloddish, but dangerous to America and the rest of the world. Here I am surrounded by media filled with stories about Britain and the rest of Europe - and also about the strike in Nigeria, the effects of tourism on Nepal, the rising economic clout of Singapore, and the global nature of the recession, unemployment, pollution, and renewed nationalisms. Before I left for Britain, the American press was beating to death the story of gays in the military. The contrast makes the American media's narrow focus seem unbelievably self-indulgent and irresponsible.

I can only imagine what kind of superficial and boring coverage Europe's currency crisis and the collapse of the Exchange Rate Mechanism got. Such a story is invariably deemed too complicated and remote for Americans to follow. Here, however, it was front-page news for weeks, characterized by highly animated, dramatic, and accessible reporting.

Reading the British press also puts another feature of American punditry into bas-relief: the way redbaiting, after all these years, is still used in America to cloud intelligent debate and to reduce deeply complex issues into crude and often lethal caricatures. While there is...