Revenge of the Brits

Why have the British come for America’s media? Not only is Emma Tucker shaking things up, to howls of indignation, at The Wall Street Journal, but Mark Thompson is running the show at CNN, John Micklethwait at Bloomberg News, Keith Poole at The New York Post, and Daisy Veerasingham at the Associated Press. None of these appointments, however, caused the kind of grief that we are now witnessing at The Washington Post, where the British CEO, Will Lewis, recently announced the appointment of a longtime Fleet Street hack, Rob Winnett, as the paper’s new editor.

The British media invasion is causing considerable consternation—see, for example, the Post ’s lengthy exposé about its own incoming editor, detailing Winnett’s alleged connections with the shadier figures of the U.K. press world when he was a reporter at The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. Putting aside the accusations, the tenor of the investigation is melancholic: Is the newspaper of Watergate fame really about to import the discredited morals of Fleet Street? Do its owners not understand the constitutional importance of the newspaper’s endeavor? The same air of dismay has run through much American reporting since Winnett’s appointment, focusing on the “rough and tumble” nature of the Brits lately arrived in the metropole, with their backward ways, as if they resembled Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. It was one thing having the late Christopher Hitchens louchely lecturing America on how to run the imperium, but to have Brits actually in charge, bringing their standards and their culture—intolerable.

The fact that Lewis and Tucker both stand accused of insulting their staff by not being adulatory enough is an indication of the culture clash at work beneath—and it raises the question of whether the two very different journalistic traditions can successfully be bridged. Lewis reportedly infuriated the Post’s staff by informing the newsroom that the paper had lost half its audience since 2020 and more than $1 million a week in the past year. They replied, Yes, but look at how many Pulitzers we’ve won. I can imagine Lewis biting down hard on his tongue at this point, the instincts of a lifetime in British newspapers hurtling to the surface. When Tucker unveiled plans to cut eight jobs, meanwhile, her staff protested by posting scores of brightly colored Post-it Notes on her office wall.

A belief seems to pervade American media that whatever the merits of Britain’s ability to produce the odd figure of worth—Hitchens, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, say—Fleet Street is a fundamentally corrupt and tawdry place. Of course, the U.K. media can be as serious and self-regarding as any U.S. outlet—think David Attenborough, father of the nation, savior of the planet. And it’s not hard to imagine the BBC, which is endlessly self-involved, running an exposé about itself.

[Helen Lewis: The British prime minister bowed to the inevitable]

But on the whole, the U.K. press does contain an element of unseriousness alien to most U.S. newspapers. My own story is a case in point. As a trainee at the tabloid Daily Mirror, I dressed up in a giant yellow chicken outfit to chase Conservative politicians around London as an election stunt. I would often think of this with a wry smile when, years later, I was subjected to an Atlantic fact-checker asking whether I was sure the painting in Boris Johnson’s office was hanging over the fireplace rather than above his desk.

Britain’s tabloid culture may seem strangely foreign, an image from a Monty Python sketch, but it can be understood as a product both of Britain’s wider media environment—which is small by American standards and entirely centered on a single city, London, the financial, political, and cultural capital rolled into one—and of our national culture more generally, which is allergic to that core of American news culture: earnestness. In the U.K., this has created a hypercompetitive world of partisan magazines, tabloids, broadsheets, and broadcasters, in which the most highly prized traits are speed, wit, and savvy. This is the world that made not only Hitchens and Waugh, as well as Tucker, Lewis, Winnett, and Thompson, but also as diverse a range of figures in recent decades as Mehdi Hasan, Piers Morgan, Harry Evans, David Frost, Andrew Sullivan, and Tina Brown, to name just a few. It is a world where power, privilege, friendship, and access all overlap to a degree that American journalists might find unacceptably compromising, but that on occasion enables British journalists to turn on those in power with a fraternal fury that is rarely seen in American print.

British and American media cultures are different, just as our national cultures are different. Yes, Brits who are journalists are less likely to consider ourselves an important part of the constitutional order (unless you happen to work for the BBC). And there is a preternatural horror of being earnest that simply does not seem to exist in Puritan America. Speed, wit, and fluency may be admired in America, but they are our obsessions. American culture has been invading Britain for decades. The British invasion of American media is the empire striking back.

A telling sign of these times is that CNN’s Mark Thompson is intent on bringing the BBC’s long-running satirical quiz show to U.S. television. Do the Americans know what’s in store for them? Have I Got News for You is not just a show but a staple of British life; a constant amid the turmoil of the past few decades, reflecting something essential in our national soul.

Whereas America’s populist revolt was led by the man from The Apprentice, ours came from the man made famous for goofing around on Have I Got News for You: Boris Johnson. The show first aired in 1990, but is still going. The premise is that two teams compete to answer questions about the week’s news, but the real contest is for laughs in an arena where caustic humor is prized above all.

When Johnson first appeared on the show, in 1998, he was a rising columnist for the right-of-center broadsheet The Daily Telegraph. In that debut, Johnson was mercilessly tormented by the opposing team’s leader, Ian Hislop, the editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, over an embarrassing incident in Johnson’s past, in which he had been caught on tape apparently agreeing to hand over to an old Etonian school chum the home address of a journalist whom the friend wanted beaten up. “Ha ha, ha ha, richly comic,” Johnson said, squirming, and conceded that his friend had made a “major goof.” The cringeworthy episode was notable as an early instance of many such moments when, rather than destroying his career, Johnson somehow succeeded in cementing his public image as “a lovable, self-mocking buffoon,” as the novelist Jonathan Coe later described it.

[Read: Hitchens remembered]

And yet, the very next year, Johnson was appointed editor of The Spectator magazine, a post in which he continued after being elected a Conservative member of Parliament in 2001, and even after becoming his party’s spokesperson on the arts. Yes, this really happened: To appreciate the oddness of it, try imagining The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, having a side hustle as the minority leader of the New York State Assembly. In Coe’s assessment, Johnson’s appearances on Have I Got News for You showcased his unique political skill in being able to turn a joke on himself and so neuter its power. The headline of Coe’s piece in the London Review of Books summed up his argument: Britain, he argued, was “Sinking Giggling Into the Sea.” Britain had stopped taking itself seriously, and so had its voters. Is this now the American fate?

The vision of Britannia sinking below the waves, giggling as she did so, has always stuck with me. If we must decline, we shall do so with an eyebrow raised and a gin and tonic in our hand, not taking ourselves too seriously. The comedian Spike Milligan captured something of the national soul with the Gaelic epitaph on his gravestone, which translates into “I told you I was ill.”

In Britain, Johnson’s gift of self-satire took him all the way to prime-ministerial office—before his unseriousness during the pandemic lockdowns brought him down. But as Johnson’s career also amply illustrates, British journalism has a certain pragmatism about connections and proximity to power. One irony of Johnson’s career is that he was eventually dragged out of political office by Fleet Street’s investigative efforts into a scandal, which, in a nod to the Post’s finest hour, was dubbed “Partygate.”

Johnson’s saga, mixing journalism and political power, might seem alien to an American audience, though it is anything but in Britain. Another young journalist who rose to prominence at The Spectator was James Forsyth, who became the magazine’s political editor. In 2022, Forsyth left the post to become political secretary to his friend, the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak. The pair are godparents to each other’s children and were best man at each other’s wedding. Forsyth is married to another political journalist, Allegra Stratton, who served for a time as Boris Johnson’s press secretary.

Examples of this revolving door abound. Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May, employed as her director of communications Robbie Gibb, a former BBC journalist—who now sits on the board of the BBC. The most glaring example may be Evgeny Lebedev, the son of the KGB spy chief Alexander Lebedev, who in 2009 bought the London newspaper The Evening Standard, and made David Cameron’s former chancellor, George Osborne, its editor. After Osborne’s tenure, Lebedev appointed Cameron’s sister-in-law Emily Sheffield as his successor in 2021. That same year, Johnson raised Lebedev to the peerage, guaranteeing him a lifelong seat in the British legislature as Lord Lebedev of Siberia. Again, all of that actually happened.

Such stories have helped establish in the American mind an image of Fleet Street as a lawless place where morally dubious newshounds play fast and loose with the facts, mixing high society and low ethics with a certain sleazy brio. Tom Wolfe captured this caricature in his 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, through the character Peter Fallow, an amoral British hack who has arrived in New York to join his countrymen in taking over New York’s leading tabloid, The City Light. Fallow delights in the “gutter syntax” of the British-occupied tabloid’s headlines, relishing “the extraordinary esthétique de l’abattoir that enabled these shameless devils, his employers, his compatriots, his fellow Englishmen, his fellow progeny of Shakespeare and Milton, to come up with things like this day after day.” This idea of the British hack lodged firmly in the American mind.

In Wolfe’s portrait, a sense lingers that these Brits still somehow look down their noses at the Americans for taking themselves so seriously, as if they were little more than social climbers pretending to be better than they are. Wolfe describes Fallow and his compatriots at The City Light seeing themselves as “fellow commandos in this gross country.” I wonder whether such condescension is also part of the response to the British invasion sweeping across the American media?

[Tom McTague: The worst, best prime minister]

As with most caricatures, Wolfe’s portrait contains a grain of truth. In my experience in British and American newsrooms, I have seen the real cultural differences. American journalism has stricter codes about sourcing—placing greater emphasis on getting briefings on the record, for example. U.S. newsrooms also tend to be less hierarchical than those in Britain, where the editor is king and all below him must bend the knee. At both Politico and The Atlantic, I remember watching with some amazement as staff aired grievances openly to the editor—rather than moaning to friends in the pub at the end of the day. Americans really believed in this democracy business. Only The Guardian in Britain has such a culture, but its journalists are notoriously odd fish.

This goes some way to explaining why Lewis and Tucker have come in for criticism from disgruntled staff at the Post and Journal who haven’t taken kindly to being told some hard truths about the state of the industry and their own publication. The flip side is that the average British hack would see American newspaper copy as turgid, self-serious, and slow—topped by notoriously bad headlines. I don’t know a British editor who does not feel they could make American news more readable, to the point, fluent, and fun. Something about storytelling also differs between the two cultures. In Britain, the line is king—the explosive fact or story that is the crux of a piece—regardless of whether it might have been discovered in ways seen as disreputable. In the U.S., meanwhile, “the narrative” is sovereign and means scrupulously sourced facts are arranged into a satisfying order, even if, to my mind, the resulting story does not always stand up to full scrutiny.

There are other differences, too. In the United States, access to power is cherished, as is a sense of gravity about the mission. In Britain, we prefer our columnists to cast a scornful eye over the country from afar, reveling in their lack of political contacts—even if, in fact, they are themselves scions of the elite. Our most high-profile writers—such as Giles Coren, Jeremy Clarkson, Quentin Letts, Camilla Long, and Marina Hyde—are acerbic, funny critics. This is our culture and the culture of Have I Got News for You.

But in almost every other way, the Wolfe caricature of the booze-drenched British hack is passé, as is the notion of Fleet Street as a den of iniquity. First of all, the boozing has largely disappeared. When I joined the parliamentary lobby in 2010, the older correspondents could still remember when they would adjourn to the pub after a morning briefing at Downing Street. No more. Although Hislop’s Private Eye might still nickname Will Lewis “Thirsty” (code: He likes a drink), the British expats now running some of America’s newsrooms bear no resemblance to Wolfe’s lampoon.

Tucker is a serious, sober, distinctly modern journalist, much closer in kind to the super-successful, hard-charging American business executive than Wolfe’s dilettante. Winnett, despite—or perhaps because of—the image presented in the Post, carries probably the best reputation of any journalist in U.K. news media that I know. His greatest hit—a 2009 exposé of dodgy parliamentary expenses—has caused some consternation in the U.S. because his newspaper at the time, The Daily Telegraph, paid the whistleblower for his information. The revelations produced panic around Parliament, as a national outpouring of fury over the revelations threatened to sweep away the entire political class. Those who worked on the story insist that the source was paid only to cover his legal fees, and say that almost all such journalism comes with ethical dilemmas. The expenses scandal is, in fact, a good example of how, despite the sometimes-cozy relationship between the press and politicians, uncompromising news reporting can induce the British to turn on their political class with a ferocity rarely seen in the U.S. The British press relentlessly pursued Johnson until he had to resign; the American press did not prove so powerful with Donald Trump, despite the clearly more serious charges.

[Helen Lewis: The British right’s favorite sex offender]

Although British newspapers certainly are more irreverent and more partisan than their American peers, that is not the whole story either. In some respects, America reserves its toughest political coverage and best satire for television. Living in the U.S. in the mid-2000s, I remember watching The O’Reilly Factor and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and thinking that we had nothing like them back home in the U.K. The same is true today of, say, Joe Rogan, who combines comedy and politics in a populist-conspiracist way that has no real equivalent in Britain.

Ultimately, though much has been made of the British invasion, the reality is that U.S. media are now also U.K. media, and vice versa. Despite British cynicism about the earnestness of American reportage, there is also plenty of reverence for American journalism, just as there is for American culture generally. We may mock, but then we take the knee—and continue doing so long after America has stopped. This is the irony today. Britain is awash with American culture, norms, politics—and media. When Wall Street was occupied, so too, inevitably, was the City of London. When the tents started popping up for Gaza at Columbia, they soon followed suit in Cambridge. Like the ancient Britons adopting the customs and costumes of the Romans, so now the modern Britons match the habits of the new imperium.

Throughout my time covering British politics, our two governing parties have battled to hire American celebrity politicos to tell us how to appeal to our own voters. In journalism, Britain now has a cult of the U.S.-style long read. Patrick Radden Keefe’s recent New Yorker story “The Oligarch’s Son” was widely acknowledged in London as a piece of exemplary reportage that no British outlet could hope to match, because of its scale, ambition, and sheer labor. In fact, The New Yorker and The Atlantic are status symbols in London, just as the New York Times app is on every British media executive’s phone. In U.K. newsrooms, U.S. media websites are displayed on big screens as prominently as their British rivals.

This—and what started as the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which rocked Fleet Street in 2011 and led to a government inquiry that came close to imposing mandatory state regulation—have changed the nature of the British press. It is no longer the world of Tom Wolfe’s imagination, but a more sedate, earnest, and ultimately American environment. Only without America’s money.

In reverse, The Guardian, The Spectator, and my own publication, UnHerd, have growing American readerships and seek to address U.S. news in ways those readers will find accessible. Even if American editors have yet to take over British newspapers, the size of The New York Times’s London bureau now rivals that of any British publication, producing occasionally brilliant reporting and occasionally ludicrous reflections of a Britain more aligned with what its American audience wants to read than with the reality. The truth is that we already live in an American world. The internet is merely melding our media together as well—in ways that seem to be setting alight the vanities that still dominate both of our newspaper cultures.