The great transatlantic newspaper divide

MARY DEJEVSKY compares the coverage in the British and US media.

LONDON - One week on, and we in the British press are just starting to wake up, rub our eyes and discover all over again that news goes on in places other than New York City and Washington DC.

For seven whole days, though, the media have been dominated by one story: the United States terrorist attacks.

That was all that most of us wanted to write about and all - judging by the sight of empty newsstands and commuters engrossed in reams of newsprint - that Britons wanted to read about.

Throughout the week, the front pages - especially, as ever, the tabloids - reflected British grief, British losses, and British empathy with the US and its shocked public.

On the Day of Mourning (Saturday), The Sun's headline was "God Bless America", and the centre spread was completely taken up by an American flag, together with the invitation to display it as a mark of solidarity.

The Daily Mail had the Stars and Stripes and a similar invitation on its back page. The front was taken up with the portraits of eight missing Britons under the headline: "Our Loss".

A day earlier, the Sun had printed a front-page picture of three New York firemen in epic pose, raising the Stars and Stripes over mountains of rubble. "True Grit" was the muted headline.

The broadsheets were only a little less participatory in a disaster that had, for all its global implications, taken place on American soil, against American targets. Friday's Times had "Good will prevail over evil" as its main front-page headline over a huge picture of the destruction in Lower Manhattan.

The Daily Telegraph had "Hundreds of Britons dead"; the Independent commented "Silent world united in grief".

All this might have been unworthy of noting, had it not provided such a marked contrast with the coverage in the mainstream American papers.

While the British newspapers, led by the tabloids, wore their hearts on their sleeve, the US media were by and large displaying that stiff upper lip for which the British are better known.

Even the Financial Times published a huge colour picture on its front page after the attacks - but the US broadsheets kept to their customary format.

The headlines and pictures may have been a little larger, but not much, and there was a sobriety in the coverage, a distance, that seemed removed from the scale and horror of what had happened.

This one vast, terrible, historic event, seemed to capture the essential difference between newspaper journalism as it is practised on either side of the Atlantic.

On the British side - an immediacy, a verve and a style that may not be authoritative or exhaustive, but tries to tell it how it is, often to riveting effect.

There is a sense of adventure in the coverage that allows rules to be broken, that changes the format to suit the content and expects the on-the-spot reporters to put something of themselves and their personal experience into their reports.

On the US side, there is a cooler, more self-conscious and arguably more dignified treatment, born of the journalism school approach. It prizes detailed chronicling of what happened, when and how - but not necessarily why.

The perpetual striving of American journalism to separate reporting from comment is both an advantage at such times, and a liability. It can feel soulless and shorn of "real people".

Day after day the main headlines were clinically factual and written as though from outside what was happening.

Only on Sunday did the New York Post venture a giant headline: "War" - with an explanation underneath that this was part of President Bush's address, rather than the verdict of the paper's editors.

Compare for graphic immediacy the Mirror headline: "I want his head on a platter", beside a portrait of Osama bin Laden, and attributed to the US Vice-President.

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