Well the eight weeks are up. I do fully intend to post more in the future, but my work schedule right now is just crazy and I really need to dedicate myself to other tasks for the time being. I have to write a 1000 word personal reflection on what I’ve explored on this thing and my experience of writing it though anyway, so provided it’s not too embarrassing I’ll post it up here for anybody mad enough to read it sometime in January.

Thanks to everybody who have taken the time to read this, and a special thanks to anybody who’s left comments. Do feel free to keep doing so, and I’ll do my best to reply at some point.

For now though goodbye…it’s been emotional.

Bryson’s column was written in 1996, at a time when coverage of foreign news in the American press must have been at a particular lull. This was by no means confined to the written media. Bryson states that he watched CNN’s nightly news bulletin, the curiously-named ‘Your World Today’, and found just one of the 22 stories related to events outside the US. This story concerned then vice-president Gore’s trip to China to promote trade between the two nations. In other words, the only foreign coverage concerned an event directly related to the US.

I’ve been to the States twice myself, once in 1999 and again in 2004. There was a definite difference in the amount of foreign news I found on the two trips, with much more found on the latter unsurprisingly, but the notion that the US media only cover the outside world when their nation has a direct involvement remains a truism. In 1999 there was virtually no coverage at all, in 2004 there was quite a bit but it was all about Iraq.

Iraq did at least mean that we Brits got the occasional mention, but I doubt we figure much at all on the agenda anymore. I remember flicking over to Fox just a year later in 2005 to see what they thought of the election here. The entire result and its meaning in the country were given over to just a 60-second bulletin. Pause for a moment to contrast that with the round-the-clock coverage in the run up to the US elections in this country last year.

As a (mostly) proud Englishman I would have considered all this grossly unfair until recently. But something Ariela off my Global course remarked a couple of weeks ago after Chris Dickey’s lecture has stuck with me and forced me to reappraise. Slightly annoyed that Mr Dickey was making generalisations about Americans that reinforce the negative stereotype, she said that one thing she had realised since moving here was the degree to which the US is watched in comparison with everybody else. And truly the rest of the world is interested in, and judging, what Americans do on a daily basis to an extent not experienced by probably any other people in history.

So when I think of just a few of the things that I’m ashamed about in my country from just the past year or so: the expenses scandal, the poorly equipped soldiers, the bank bonuses, and so forth, I realise it’s actually quite nice that the rest of the world, including the US, pays scant interest in our affairs. With great power comes great responsibility as they say in Spiderman, which is why it’s important the US does take interest in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, I’ll leave the power and responsibility to them if it means nobody pays attention next time Gordon Brown is on TV.

Conservapedia – the self styled ‘trustworthy Encyclopedia’ – dates from Nov 2006. It was set up by lawyer and social studies teacher Andy Schlafly because he felt that ‘Wikipedia had a “liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American” bias’ (thank you, Wikipedia). On visiting the site your eyes are quickly drawn to its ‘Commandments’ (seven rather than ten), which say of its supposedly liberal forbear:

‘Everything you post must be true and verifiable. Do not copy from Wikipedia^[1] or elsewhere unless it was your original work [...]It is appropriate to quote or cite Wikipedia to illustrate the liberal view of an issue. For example, one could cite the Wikipedia atheism or evolution articles to illustrate a liberal view in regards to atheism or the evolutionary paradigm.’

Getting a feel for their angle? Essentially, if you set up your site in express opposition to Wikipedia’s supposed liberal, anti-Christian and anti-American bias; then it stands to reason that your site, far from being an impartial encyclopedic alternative, will be conservative, avidly pro-Christian and pro-American. All of which might be merely laughable were it not for the flagrant myths the site propagates. Take this one, from the page of Barak Obama:

‘Obama’s budget and stimulus bill advanced his socialist idea of “spreading the wealth.”^{[14] [15]} His health care plan would force employers to purchase health care or pay a fine and will force many into a poorly run single payer system’

Hmm, sounds like opinion rather than verifiable fact doesn’t it? Are they violating their own commandments? For shame.

Let’s be blunt about this: for all wikipedia’s faults (and they are many), the lies printed on its pages are the result of rogue or misinformed people changing the page. In the case of conservapedia, despite what they might claim in their commandments, the pages of people like Obama are the way there because of a bias built right into the system.

What’s wonderful is that there now is a ‘liberalpedia’ dedicated to attacking conservapedia and explicitly advocating the values for which Wikipedia was originally attacked. To draw a very interesting if slightly contrived parallel, it’s almost as if the circumstances and politics of television media in the US has been transposed to the web, with CNN as the Wiki, Fox as conserva, and MSNBC as liberal.

In this sense it reflects the growing polarisation of the media and America as a country generally. Where is one meant to turn for impartial information then? There’s always Britannica, I guess.

On Thursday I had my first ever thanksgiving meal. Living with an American girl for a year, we thought it would be a nice touch and I have to say I enjoyed it immensely. The food was brilliant and plentiful, with the only downside the fact that I found out yams were simply sweet potato after all these years. We took great delight in going round the table and saying what we were thankful for, and reciting the pledge of allegiance and national anthem (or rather the first line of each, as that was all we knew; Adrienne my housemate knew it all being from D.C but had to be seriously cajoled into saying so).

I mention all this because I’ve given the US and its media a lot of stick over the past couple of months, and with a little over a week to go before I’m officially allowed to wrap this blog up (although I hope to continue writing it afterwards purely for myself anyway) I thought I’d better give a little back. Because, in short, I love America…and sometimes I love their media.

This is rarely a default position for English people anyway, but for eight long years I truly was out in the cold whenever the US was mentioned amongst the majority of my fellow countrymen. No matter how much I might point out to people that America was a huge country of many contradictions and viewpoints, it was hard to get people to see past the Bush administration. I’m glad to say that’s changed a lot since November, but I still want to outline just a few of the reasons why I have the admiration and affection for the place that I do before I sign off. If I was to list everything then we’d be here awhile, so in keeping with this blog I’ll keep my discussion to their cultural output and rejecting the notion of critics like Herbert I. Schiller that the media is an essential part of supposed American imperialism.

If I pause to consider what I consider to be my favourite films, the candidates are all American. As proof, I’ll just copy and paste the list unedited from a certain social networking site: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, Saving Private Ryan, The Empire Strike Back, Memento, This is Spinal Tap, The Matrix (Strictly only the first one), Donnie Darko, Trainspotting, and South Park to name but a few. 

Now of these, you’ll probably notice only one is British. Some would passionately argue that this is purely because Hollywood is so powerful that it attracts all the money and talent to the detriment of the British film industry, and they probably have a point. Yet this is not the same as suggesting Hollywood is a tool of the establishment essential to conditioning Americans and the rest of the world to a certain point of view as an academic like Ziauddin Sardar suggests in the book American Dream: Global Nightmare. Consider the politics and message of the first few films on my list. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest examines the corruption and madness (pun intended) of the American psychiatric system, Pulp Fiction the American condition of pastiche, pop culture and violence, Fight Club the directionless nature of an entire generation. Without wishing to generalize or labour the point, these films are hardly ringing endorsements of their mother country. Nor are they obscure or box office failures, indeed they rank as some of the most successful films of all time.

I could apply a similar principle to my favourite authors, bands, or TV programs. In the case of the latter though you’re probably familiar with The Simpsons; in most people’s opinions one of the greatest programs ever created which just so happens to be a highly satirical examination of a highly dysfunctional American family and society.

So let’s finish with the news itself. The thing I love about the American news media is its variety. For all its faults Fox and its raving presenters are hugely entertaining (even if not for the reasons they intend), and at the other end of the spectrum you have CNN who are second maybe only to the BBC in the respect and reach they have as an organisation worldwide. On the web, you have blogs like Andrew Sullivan’s that juggle news analysis, in-depth philosophical and religious discussion, and funny YouTube videos; something you would never find in this country outside of those sites run by crackpots or cults. Granted, Sullivan was born here, but his sensibilities and interests are firmly American.

I hope that last point doesn’t just violate everything I’ve just wrote about the variety of American personality and opinions. What I mean to say is that there is a difference between being American and being English, and that’s partly why I find the former so fascinating. Cecil Rhodes once wrote that to be born English was to win first prize in the lottery of life, Winston Churchill that if he hadn’t have been born English he would have liked to have been American. I’m inclined to agree with both.

Those on the right are outraged about just about every aspect of the concept, not least the notion that Mohammed could walk free if acquitted by the court. Mike Huckabee, potential Republican Presidential candidate in 2012 but currently talk-show host on Fox, intimated that the Democratic Party was “finished” if KSM walks free. Now, quite apart from the fact that walking free if acquitted is supposed to be the point of American justice, one can be certain he will not be walking free as a result of the upcoming trial. Ken Gude, a human-rights expert at the Centre for American Progress (a think-tank), said the following in response to the furore:

“They have three sources of authority that would allow him to detain [KSM], one of which is the AUMF [Authorized Use of Military Force], because it directly cites the 9/11 attacks in its language — the people who planned the 9/11 attacks are combatants and are detainable under the AUMF. Under the .000001 chance that they are acquitted, they will have that authority to detain them.”

So no worries there then. But it does beg the question why he would be acquitted in the first place. After all, the evidence he was involved in 9/11 seems overwhelming. The answer is torture, and the degree to which the CIA’s torturing of KSM compromises the evidence and the trial as a whole.

Unfortunately, the evidence that KSM was tortured is pretty much as solid as that attaining to his involvement in terrorism.

There are two big problems with torture – leaving aside for a moment my belief that it is degrading, barbaric, and totally at odds with what America is meant to stand for – and that is that it is illegal and it doesn’t work anyway. In terms of the first point, consider the following line from Nice Guy Eddie in one of my favourite films, Reservoir Dogs: ‘You beat on this prick enough; he’ll tell ya he started the Chicago fire. That don’t necessarily make it so!’ As Tarantino so eloquently put it, you torture anybody for long enough and they will tell you exactly what you want to hear, or they will die. That does not good intelligence make (to paraphrase Yoda, and continue my film theme).

Not convinced by quotes from fictional characters? Fair enough. So take a look at the words of the man at the centre of the storm himself, Mr Mohammed, given to the Red Cross:

“During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time.”

So here’s the rub: not only does torture not work, it actively hampers real investigations. More crucially for the purposes of the upcoming trial, the ‘evidence’ it supposedly produces is inadmissible in court and prejudices the real evidence ascertained through traditional Western methods of interrogation. That we didn’t torture is one of the reasons that, despite all our faults, I believed we were better than our enemies.

That the Bush administration chose to abandon such a principle is abhorrent, but just as galling is that they pretended they hadn’t and large swathes of the media went along this. According to Bush officials, they did not torture but rather used ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Here is a brief definition of one such technique: ‘a prisoner is made to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shacked to a bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours.’ Another, water-boarding, simulated drowning so prisoners thought they were dieing. Not torture clearly. Orwell is spinning in his grave.

And yet respected publications like The Washington Times, the paper of Woodward and Bernstein, refused to call water-boarding or sleep deprivation ‘torture’, instead using official terminology like ‘coercive techniques’. That definition once again: ‘a prisoner is made to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shacked to a bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours.’

 Let’s be clear, whether anybody thinks the Bush administration was ultimately right to torture (and I don’t think many at the Washington Post would) is irrelevant, the point is that they did torture and it was illegal. Thank God Obama has put a stop to this shameful period in American history. Now if he could just match up to his pledge to close Guantanamo, we might finally be able to move on.

Don’t worry my topic this week isn’t Dickey related, but rather focuses on the person featured on the cover. Yep, the one in running shorts, the one that’s Sarah Palin.

The image in question here wasn’t taken by Newsweek, unsurprisingly, but rather was done for a running magazine some time ago. That the left-leaning publication chose to use such an image gives an indication of the seriousness and deference with which Mrs Palin is treated by elements of the press (for confirmation read the tag: ‘She’s bad news for the GOP and everybody else too’, which leaves precious little to the imagination with regard to their opinion of her). However, I say elements of the press, and truly don’t wish to generalise, because Palin is a figure that divides the media and nation as a whole unlike few others.

It goes without saying that if we were back in the spring of 2008 then I wouldn’t be writing a blog on Palin, and Newsweek certainly wouldn’t be putting her on their front cover. She was a virtual unknown outside Alaska until John McCain, flagging in the polls and needing to energise the Republican base, picked her as a running mate. The rest, as they say, is history. Except this history, and Palin’s prominence in media coverage, has yet to fully play out.

This point was emphasised last week when Palin’s book ‘Going Rogue’ was unleashed upon the American public. Palin hasn’t categorically come out and said she intends to run for nomination in 2012, but she’s far from ruled it out either, and it’s hard not to view this book as the first step in her campaign. This simultaneously excites the right-wing and terrifies the left-wing of the media in the states. Their coverage of her book tour, just like coverage of the woman herself, couldn’t be more different.

It tends to be that the MSM media are pretty sceptical of her, but are wary of running pieces skewering the book or the woman because of the aforementioned way she divides opinion. This leaves the blogs as the battleground for attacking or defending her image. The exception, naturally, is our beloved friend Fox News, who remain up to their old tricks. Last week they screened footage supposedly taken at a Palin book signing showing a huge crowd that had turned out to see their idol. It turned out the film was from the archives of the presidential campaign last year. Cue another slightly embarrassing apology the next day from their anchor, where she claimed it was a simple error rather than an attempt to mislead.

Over at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan cynically wondered why it was Fox never seemed to make these ‘errors’ when covering left-wing or democratic gatherings. Sullivan himself has been leading the charge, sometimes it appears single-handedly, against Palin generally for the past year. If you were to log onto his blog any day the past week you would have been inundated with articles and analysis about the woman; one, not written by Sullivan himself, even tries to weigh up whether it is correct to label her a ‘liar’ or a ‘bullshitter’. This has provoked dissent from his usually loyal readers, who consider such personal attacks below him and would rather he concentrate on more serious issues.

Yet as Sullivan sees it, a woman so unqualified and perhaps even delusional should never be allowed anywhere near the position of President of the United States with all the responsibility and power that entails (think big red button). And yet, if the election had gone the other way and had an relatively old-man like McCain suffered some sort of tragedy, that is precisely the position she would have adopted. Therefore, somebody has to stop her even if it means losing readers.

Newsweek’s audience were equally dismayed with the publication’s recent tactic. A complete collection of what people wrote can be found here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/223850

My personal favourite though is this:

“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah?” Certainly not by giving her another cover!
Jeff Crandall, Canastota, N.Y.

And maybe that’s the crux of it. Palin is a media-created machine, who seems to love the limelight above all else (certainly above actually governing, she quit her only political post last year seemingly to write the book). As long as the American media continue to give her airtime, she might just get to the Whitehouse. I can think of no better reason for me never to write a blog on her again…

“[Brought to the fore are] unworldly TV talk show hosts and journalists who deem it necessary to win viewership at a time of an acute advertising crunch, by being more outrageous and sensational than the next channel. On any given issue the public barely learns anything new nor is it presented with all sides of the argument. Every talk show host seems to have his own agenda and his guests reflect that agenda rather than offer alternative policies.”

This was actually written specifically about Pakistan. But I think you might recognise it’s characterises from things I’ve previously written. New media are indeed copying an American model, even unwittingly, but it’s fair and balanced only in the sense with which Fox is.

As far as Christopher Dickey is concerned, public understanding of terrorism has been fatally flawed for a long time and the press is largely responsible.

There are two big misapprehensions about terror. Firstly, the notion that terrorism simply appeared on 9/11. It is true that nobody saw the actual event coming, nor perhaps even perceived the tragic scale of such an event, but more informed people (and the sad fact is that was pathetically few journalists and politicians and even less ordinary people) recognised that terrorism had been around for decades. Indeed, Dickey himself spent the 80s in Cairo where bombings were as regular as they are today in Pakistan or recently in Iraq. Moreover, the threat from Al Qaeda themselves was well established in the historical record both through their rhetoric and their bombings of embassies and targets like the USS Cole. 

Dickey himself was in New York on 9/11, self-imprisoned in his home in an attempt to focus on writing his novel. It was only when two workmen arrived to clean his rug that he turned on the TV; just in time to see the second plane hit. He rang his wife and immediately said ‘this is Al Qaeda; I have to go to the office’. I doubt many other journalists responded with the first part of that sentence that day.

So it’s a myth that terrorism erupted completely out of the blue eight years ago. It’s simply the case that up until then nobody was interested in reading about it. At the same time as America was attempting to bomb Bin Laden in the 90’s following the Africa bombings, the media were obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. To give you greater context of what readers wanted, the week before 9/11 Dickey penned a piece for Newsweek profiling Giorgio Armani.

So the failure to write about terrorism and perceive an event like 9/11 was an error, but this was compounded by the subsequent reaction to the atrocity which ultimately ended in war with Iraq.

It is clear from the Bush administrations ‘axis of evil’ rhetoric that they wanted to make a confrontation with Islamic extremism akin to the cold war. After all, this consciously echoes Reagan’s ‘empire of evil’ shtick. The trouble was that the modern threat and situation was incomparable with that which characterised the Soviet Union. But it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The talking up of the threat of terrorism, parroted unquestioningly by the press, led to draconian laws, epitomised in the Patriot Act, that restricted American freedoms. Then, when the war with Afghanistan was seemingly won easily in just a few weeks, attention turned to Iraq and its supposed links to Al Qaeda and again the media, caught up in jingoistic fever, abdicated its responsibilities and failed to ask any of the tough questions that just might have averted the conflict. The misinformation was such that by the election of 2004, 60% of Republicans still thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 despite there not being a shred of evidence for the claim.

It is Dickey’s belief that the media discredited themselves to the extent that they still haven’t fully recovered, and may never again do so. Young people increasingly get their news from comedians like John Stewart on the Daily Show (it was intriguing to see the clip I put on my blog about their time in Iran used in Mr Dickey’s lecture yesterday), rather than the MSM. Older people on the other hand increasingly want the narrative of Fox or MSNBC which simply reaffirms their prejudices. CNN, to quote Dickey, ‘is just plain boring’.

Regardless, people are becoming tired of news, particularly foreign news. And when American troops pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, an event likely in the next couple of years, its possible the country will revert to its default mode of isolationism. This, compounded by worsening budgets and the closure of bureaus (despite covering the mid-east, Dickey is based in Paris remember), does not paint a rosy future for foreign news coverage. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another tragedy like 9/11 to jolt Americans or the media out of their stupor.

I’ve learnt a lot from the experience of having him around, not least the importance of constantly checking and updating one’s own Wikipedia page. Mr Dickey, one of the strongest and most sustained critics of the Iraq war from the beginning, we were reliably informed on his Wikipedia entry vocally supported the war. The page did quote Dickey, but completely out of context and without an accompanying footnote. ‘Some asshole is clearly screwing with me,’ he said when I pointed this out to him. The page is now, thankfully, corrected.

Anyways, I haven’t time to go into everything he talked about. Even if I did, he’s likely elucidated on it elsewhere far better than I can. To that end, you can find his website here: http://www.christopherdickey.com/

Nevertheless, he said some very interesting things about the state of the modern American media which are worth detailing given the nature of my blog. I’ll leave the stuff about the media’s failings with regard to the reporting of terrorism and Iraq for a subsequent post; for now I want to assess the various methods suggested to finance an industry in pretty dire straits (see my post from a few weeks entitled simply ‘oh dear’). These came out of the report ‘the state of the news media in 2009’ featured here: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/index.htm

Firstly, there is the oft-suggested idea of micro-payments. This is the notion that people pay by the article or for a series of articles, with the exact amount one would have to pay yet to be fully decided. When I visited the offices of The Star in Sheffield a few weeks back, its editor was suggesting that this was very much the route they wanted to pursue. The trouble with such a model, as Chris Dickey pointed out, is that it has already been tried and failed. The New York Times introduced pay-to-read content a couple of years ago and it was a comprehensive failure. The small number of people who opted to pay had to be given a refund and the paper’s website is now simply back the way it was.

Now, this isn’t to say the idea can never work. It may be that if there was a collaboration between all MSM outlets to introduce a micro-payment or subscription scheme at the same time then people would be forced to opt for at least one of them. Yet the evidence for this is sketchy at best. All polling suggests people simply will not pay for things they are used to getting for free. As long as that remains the case, and I see no reason why it should change, then this oft-suggested idea is doomed to remain just that, an idea.

Next up you have the concept of an NGO or foundation backing media outlets. However, while such practices are not unheard of and indeed work well in the UK with the likes of the BBC or The Guardian, there is nothing comparable in the US. The fact is that no NGO or foundation will ever have enough finance to sustain a top-quality or mass-market media organisation in that country.

So maybe corporate financing or niche markets are where you want to go instead. Both have major flaws. In the case of the latter it’s that the whole point of news is that it’s meant to be of general interest and inform everyone. We already have plenty of niche publications to cater for car enthusiasts or any other topic you can think of, so to abandon conventional news in search of such readers would be bad for democracy. The same point applies to the trend towards ‘soap opera’ coverage, whether its literally dedicating yours news bulletin to ‘Days of our Lives’ or simply reporting a political story as if those involved were characters in that program.

The problem with the corporate option on the other hand is equally one of healthy democracy, but with regard to influence and impartiality instead. How can a newspaper honestly report, or at least be perceived to honestly report, an incidence of corporate fraud or safety breach if they are being financed by the company at the story’s centre?

Hmm, how about cutting costs? Well the media are doing this all over the world with little suggestion it’s really enough. In terms of print media, which I have my career sights set on, the current trend is for the abandonment of sub-editors and the replacement of this old system with one whereby the reporter does their own copy-checking and simply puts their story onto a pre-designed template. This to my untrained, but rapidly training, eye is a madness that can only result in more error-strewn and flabby copy. My course tutor concurs.

From this systematic assassination of proposals to save the media industry you would naturally conclude that we are royally screwed. Yet thankfully Mr Dickey’s message wasn’t all doom and gloom. For while people won’t pay for things they’re used to getting for free, the suggestion is they will pay for new products. Nobody predicted the internet or all the other things that have come with it, furthermore, and it is not inconceivable that something will equally come out of the blue in the future that will radically alter the fortunes of the industry. In any case, its current potential is not fully tapped. The creation of online malls, a kind of Amazon of Amazons with news coverage and advertising built into its heart, might just offer a brighter horizon.

Nobody truly knows how the media will develop or better yet how it should develop; if they do they stand to make a lot of money. Here’s hoping if they do that the industry ends up in a similar financial state.

It details how US newspapers may soon cease publication and block their websites in the UK because of fears over suffering from our stricter libel laws. I don’t wish to make this post about the ridiculousness of UK libel laws (not for nothing is the UK known as the centre of ‘libel tourism’), but rather tackle the interesting issues it points to about the comparative freedom of the press in America and my homeland.

The key quote from The Sunday Times article is, for me, the following from Kelly Sager, legal counsel for the Los Angeles Times, about the content of the articles they are forced to block:  “Their information may be perfectly interesting, truthful and of public value but they can’t take the risk.”

This gets to the core of the issue; that unreasonable libel laws are actively harming the quality and quantity of information we in a democracy are being allowed access to.

Thankfully, under the protection of the First Amendment, American publications have a freedom we can only dream of. And yet, such is the power of celebrity in contemporary culture, Americans are now looking at the possibility of adopting the British model to provide greater redress should a newspaper publish something a pop or film star doesn’t like. Regardless of whether such libel laws are ultimately possible under the American constitution and its Bill of Rights, however, a climate of self-censorship is being induced among journalists through their fear of being sued. This can’t ultimately be good for democracy or general debate.

Over the past few weeks on my course, I’ve grown familiar with the Freedom House website and its listing of countries by their levels of press freedom. You can find it here: http://www.freedomhouse.org.

Unsurprisingly, the US and UK are both classified as ‘free’ by the site. And there is little difference between them in terms of freedom rank, with the US scoring 17, one point ahead of the UK.  These findings are from data collated in 2008, so I await to see if we have slipped in the wake of events like Max Mosely affair. Moreover, the results do not give explicit explanation as to why they are ranked in the way they are, so whether our libel laws lead to us falling a place before is unclear. In any case, it does seem that our systems have a lot in common at least with regard to press freedom. If that remains the case it should be a good thing, but only if it is but because we ease our libel laws rather than the US copying them.