BRITS VS. YANKS: I'm a little late getting to this, but I wanted to comment on it anyway. Tunku Varadarajan wrote an interesting piece Friday on the differences between British and American newspapers.

The British school regards journalistic output as perishable, and a tabloid hack's role as essentially disruptive...British-style tabloids tend to go for impact, at whatever cost, and the cost is often high in terms of collateral damage. These battle conditions require tough, leathery soldiers who will wade through minefields in the daytime and drink the fatigue away in the evening. Ergo Aussies and Brits. This kind of journalism is stacked against those who worry about special interests, and who are forever nervous about the consequences of a story on a particular group, be it ethnic, sexual or religious. The British school, whatever its failings, is good at giving offense. Americans, by contrast, are good at not giving it. This makes them better people, for sure. But does it make their papers better?

I'll agree that the British press is a lot of fun compared with our own. I'd love to be able to write some of the headlines they get away with. But imperfect as American newspapers may be, I think their seriousness has served our democracy pretty well. We all know American journalists bring their biases to their reporting, but at least that reporting is not delivered with a sneer or a wink. That's an important difference. It means we (generally) take our readers seriously and consider them to be involved citizens who care about what's going on in the world. And while false genuflecting before the cult of "journalistic standards" is often the source of embarrassment for American reporters when their biases are revealed, at least the idea of objectivity is in the air. (And that objectivity is apparent in about 80 percent of your everyday, garden-variety, meat-and-potatoes American newspaper stories - the board meetings, the police blotters, the workings of the government. Of course, we've still got to keep our eyes on that other 20 percent, because those are often the most important stories.) Those standards are a restraint on the lowest-common-denominator pandering that is all too common in British newspapers. Compare the average daily fishwrap in Dayton or Peoria with the soft-core porn of "The Mail" or "The Mirror." Boring? Sure. Necessary? Absolutely.