Through British Eyes

What picture of the U.S. do Britons get from the British press? Last week, splashed across a tabloid page of the Laborite London Daily Mirror, world's largest daily (circ. 4,514,000), was a headline: THE CLIMATE OF FEAR. Below was an article by Mirror Reporter William Connor, just returned from the U.S. A congressional investigation, wrote Connor in a fantastic comparison, "reminds you of the Communist trials, the horrible . . . Slansky affair in Prague, the grisly Mindszenty farce and a dozen other dismal puppet shows on the other side of the Iron Curtain."

A few days before, Britons had been treated to an equally hair-raising story by the London Sunday Pictorial's Special Correspondent Ralph Champion, who had been sent to find out for the Pictorial's 5,170,000 readers what the U.S. is really like. "It is horrifying," wrote Champion, who had set foot on U.S. shores for the first time just five days before, "to find everyone [in New York] suffering from war and atom phobia in their most advanced forms." Correspondent Champion found bombproof safe-deposit boxes "strictly for dollars ... no humans need apply," a Broadway "populated with sex-mad morons," and "one advertisement everywhere: Blood donors wanted. High cash payments given on the spot." (Champion admitted later that "everywhere" was actually only in small classified ads.)

"It is a bad sign," reported Conservative M. P. Beverley Baxter in Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard, "when American taxi drivers do not engage a stranger in conversation. This time the canaries did not sing . . . When I asked a friend for an explanation, he answered that America is haunted by two spectres--war and peace . . . Incidentally, a New Yorker who has lived on the fringe of world affairs . . . suggested to me that Japan might be invited to take over Korea . . . 'Japanese armament shares have had a sharp rise,' he said suavely. I make no comment on his statement, but merely put it on the record."

Shakespeare & Gangsters. As a result of such wild reporting in Britain's press many a Briton is led to believe that the U.S. is dominated by Senators Joe McCarthy and Pat McCarran, and that it is a slick, grossly materialistic country populated by bathing beauties, crooners, gangsters and political strong-arm men. Americans have a stereotype of Britain too, says the Manchester Guardian's U.S. Correspondent Alistair Cooke, but it is usually a flattering picture of "Shakespeare, dignified gentlemen, and so on," while Britons, from their press, often think the U S is made up of "jukeboxes, gangsters and glistening bathing beauties." A false image is being projected," wrote London Sunday Observer Correspondent Alastair Buchan, "of an America where liberals are hounded with bell, book and candle and where people who hold unpopular opinions are afraid to open their mouths."

Some British newsmen blame the limited British coverage of the U.S. on the newsprint shortage. It follows, they insist, since British papers have so little space they can only print the sensational news from the U.S. But every time paper rationing is eased, British dailies use the extra newsprint to add more entertainment and feature news.

In such papers as the London Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Observer, or the Manchester Guardian, where U.S. coverage is quieter and more complete, Britons do get a much more rounded picture of the U.S. But even the Times, instead of trying to explain the problem of Communists in government, often brushes the whole matter off as "witch hunting" and a shrill campaign . . . against 'spies and saboteurs' who are widely imagined to be imperiling the security of the U.S." Added the chorus of criticisms of the U.S. are such anti-American weeklies as the New Statesman & Nation, which recently said of the indictment of Owen Lattimore for perjury: "Such blanket denunciations smack more of Prague than of the traditions of Western justice."

Facts & Fancies. Some British editors recognize the distorted picture and are trying to correct it. The Observer has sent Correspondent Kenneth Harris as a roving U.S. reporter. But even Harris' first experience showed how little the British press has done to cover the U.S. When he showed up at the National Governors' Conference a little more than a year ago in Gatlinburg Tenn., the governors, who had never had a British reporter at their annual conference, could not understand why he was there. "They told me," Harts recalls, "that they were not working on any foreign aid programs."

Last week in London, the English-Speaking Union announced a joint British-American project on the points of greatest friction in public opinion between the U.S. and the Commonwealth The union might well start with the British press where the job of reporting what the U.S. is like has hardly begun.

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