Discovering the U.S.

"New York these days," mused Bernard Murphy, news editor of the London Star, after a 7 1/2hour transatlantic jet flight to this country, "is really no farther away than Newcastle." This perspective, which can be applied almost as well to Little Rock, Cape Canaveral and Hollywood, is now common coin on Fleet Street. As a result, the British press is busy discovering the U.S.--or at least trying to discover it.

The London Daily Telegraph has added a new correspondent to its U.S. staff, subscribes to the New York Times news service; the London Daily Express now has six reporters in the U.S.--four in New York, one in Washington and one on the West Coast--and has introduced a regular weekly feature called "Transatlantic Page, " a compendium of items about the U.S. The Sunday Express, which recently went to 24 pages (from an average 16), has devoted much of the extra space to U.S. coverage, keeps a fulltime correspondent, Arthur Brittenden in New York City.

In recent months British newsmen have swarmed over SAC headquarters at Omaha, flown H-bomb patrol over Alaska, eyewitnessed moon shots at Cape Canaveral, studied the lot of the Manhattan chairwoman, tuned in on Beat-Generation talk in San Francisco. London Sunday Times Reporter Kenneth Pearson flew over to file a three-part series on the Broadway musical, West Side Story--inspiring the London Daily Express to fly the West Side troupe to London for a night.

"Larger Than Life." The shrinking of the Atlantic is only one of many reasons for expanding British interest in American affairs. With an increase in tourism, Britons are returning from the U.S. with newly whetted appetites for news. Many British papers have added pages and elected to fill them with U.S. news. And through the austerity of postwar England shines the image of the fabulous States. "America has a glamour to British readers greater than any foreign country." says Correspondent Brittenden. "It offers a picture that seems slightly larger than life."

The increased crop of British correspondents is trying to depart from the cliche reporting of the past, which conjured up a fantasy land of red Indians, vast, untamed distances, beady-eyed Wall Streeters, scofflaw Chicago gunmen, political beasts and, more recently, nutburgers, healthatoriums and two-story doghouses. They also bring promise that the British reader will get a broader-based view of serious U.S. news than he has been able to get from the sometimes capable but always highly subjective accounts of the few old hands, e.g., the Manchester Guardian's Alistair Cooke. Some of the newcomers have begun to paint the U.S. with verisimilitude; Joyce Egginton, in a profile of Leonard Bernstein in the London News Chronicle, described him as "an orchestral conductor who looks like a dark-haired Danny Kaye, dresses like Mao Tse-tung, gyrates like Elvis Presley, and is apt to treat his audiences like first-year musical students."

Dog Pajamas & Dixie. British reporting on the U.S. has a long way to go; there are all too many evidences still of the old devotion to the trivial, the gaudy and the untrue. Recently the U.S. correspondent of the London Evening Standard, covering the Little Rock story, took a transatlantic call from his editor in Fleet Street. The editor wanted a graphic description of the city. Said the correspondent: "You want me to report that the streets are cobbled, characters sit around singing Dixie, and Governor Faubus rides through the city in a top hat." Replied his editor: "Yes, yes! File it!"

Don Iddon, London Daily Mail columnist, dispatched his postelection story from the beach at Miami--"a perfect place," as he solemnly informed his readers, "to cover the aftermath of a nationwide election." The Express' "Transatlantic Page," committed to an examination of "the ever-growing stream of interest and influence between Britain and America," has so far focused instead on the highly selected New York pedestrian, munching "colorful open pies as big as manhole covers," on dog pajamas and cologne, and on that "slightly fearsome phenomenon, the American wife."

Fleet Streeters hope that the new crop of British correspondents, settling into the main currents of U.S. life, will give Britain a more accurate view of that life. Most of them share Joyce Egginton's awareness of mounting U.S. influence on British manners and morals: "In reporting on America, so often we are holding a mirror up to our own future."

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