For many,British is better

Abstract

Since the start of the war in Iraq, much has been made of the fact that a significant number of Americans are turning to British news sources (such as The Guardian and the BBC) for information regarding the conflict, writes Christensen. Figures from The Guardian indicate that approximately 40 per cent of the newspaper's online readers are located in the United States. Similarly, audiences for BBC World News bulletins aired on the US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) increased by almost 30 per cent during the first weeks of the war. The BBC website has also seen a dramatic increase in the number of users from the United States. These developments have been cited by media critics as evidence of a broader dissatisfaction on the part of the American public with the state of the press in the United States. The highly commercialised and nationalistic nature of the US news media, so the argument goes, in addition to an uncomfortably close relationship between the press and the military, has made it impossible for the average citizen to get "objective" or "unbiased" information about events in Iraq.