IV. British Media 2 February 1993 After some months as a newspaper consumer rather than practitioner (the first time in 20 years, I realize) I am coming to believe that the only big sin in journalism is cynicism. It seems deeply embedded in the newspaper culture here; I wonder, is the same true at home, and merely invisible to me? The cynicism is widely manifest. One kind apparent here in the way newspapers are so overtly political-both in terms of being partisan, and in the sense of buying into the political agenda of what matters. Admittedly, British politics matter more to Brits than to me, but I just can't imagine readers really wanting the steady diet of political skirmish and positioning that winds up in the headlines here day after day after tiresome day. When the papers write about things I know or care about, they are so often sneering; coverage of the Clinton inaugural in general is a good example; Hillary in particular seems to drive them mad. Reading the stories, it's so easy to see the reporter choosing the cheap, fat target or the all-to-available put-down at the expense of larger, more fully developed story-telling. I feel cheated. As a visitor here many times before, I saw the British press as lively and varied, generally fun to read and quite diverse. As a regular, daily reader I find myself chaffing at the relentless partisan slant, bored unto distraction with a constant A-1 diet of the latest political incremental, shocked by the papers' lack of access and the general level of government secrecy. What's more, there is distinct sexism and racism in the writing, a level that you wouldn't have found in a quality U.S. paper 15 years ago. (I am talking here about the quality papers, mind you; the tabs are honestly no longer worth the time it takes to read them). Newspapers at a glance: The level of cultural coverage is very high. Several of the Sunday papers have extensive, detailed, knowledgeable stories and reviews on dozens of events every week. High brow, low brow, bourgeois, radical, traditional-it's all there. Sports writing, on the other hand, seems far below the best of the U.S. standard. (I admit that I might be missing some of the subtlety in the stories about the England-India Cricket Test, but I'm learning. I got a cricket book for Christmas and I intend to play this spring.) Opinion pages are very episodic, responding to the news of the day, and entirely predictable. I had always heard talk about the wonderful letters to the editor in England, but I haven't found many. I like the magazines in three different papers: good depth, stories clearly selected to entice, stories that work at being readable. Almost nothing on the front pages can make that claim. We also listen to the radio a lot here-a novel experience in several ways. First, we have no television, and even though we watch very little at home, its total absence is still apparent. On occasion we go down "to college" and watch CNN or SkyNews on the cable TV in the MCR (Middle Combination Room, a low-rent grad student lounge, distinct from the JCR (Junior Combination Room) and-you guessed it-SCR. We borrowed a neighbors set once, to be sure we didn't miss Bill Clinton's inauguration, but by-and-large, we're TV free. The radio offers a wide and varied alternative; we regularly scan through five BBC stations, a private classical station, the BBC World Service on shortwave and a local FM. It is far different from radio at home. BBC 1 is pop, not so different from a Top 40 station at home. BBC 2 offers an eclectic mix of talk and music-the talk being individual DJs with real personalities and styles, and the music being widely varied genre stuff: C&W one day, big band another, strange acoustic folk the next. BBC 3 is classical, including (a real treat), Peter Allen Live From the Metropolitan Opera in New York every Saturday. BBC 5 is middle-to-low-brow, lots of live soccer games, lots of sports news, meaningless music. The private classical station is more middle of the road than BBC 3, a close cousin to KLEF in Anchorage-nothing *too* challenging, heavy on Tschaikovsky, light on Mahler. And then there is Radio 4. This is the BBC public affairs and entertainment channel, a wondrous mix of skillful interview shows, radio drama, a soap opera (The Archers) that seems to have captivated everybody in Britain except me, and lots of news. From the schedule for today (printed every day in the papers, which also *cover* radio): Shipping Weather Forecast, Woman's Hour (pelvic inflammatory diseases), Thirty-Minute Theater (Theatre, here, of course), an interview show with the heads of music and musical instrument departments at Sotheby's, a science show, a feature on Queen Victoria's Scottish bodyguard, A Book At Bedtime, and much, much more, 5:55 a.m. till midnight, every day. There are a couple of panel/game shows that Barb and I try especially to catch. One is called "Just A Minute," and it requires panelists to discourse on the subject provided for a full minute, subject to challenges from competitors for pauses, repetition or general silliness. It's surprisingly adept. On another game show the host reads the first half of a famous quote and panelists provide a fictional ending, as in "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree ..... but the village council voted for a parking structure instead." These are parlor games-national parlor games-and every bit as much fun. Movies. Well, I don't go much, but then I didn't at home, either. I did go to Bob Roberts, where the crowd sat in near silence, broken only by hoots from me, Barb and our neighbors, the Mexican molecular biologists. The theater is clean, movie schedules are available a month in advance, few movies are shown on sequential nights, you can buy tickets ahead of time. There are ads before the movie-all of them far better produced than TV spots and some of them *very* sexy. They don't sell food at the show.