Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian Unlimited web site said: “We have noticed an upsurge in traffic from America, primarily because we are receiving more emails from US visitors thanking us for reporting on worldwide news in a way that is unavailable in the US media.”
The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media’s reaction to France and Germany’s intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called ‘respectable’ press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical — one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as “Hitler’s children”.
Mr Dennis said: \”American visitors are telling us they are unable to find the breadth of opinion we have on our web site anywhere else because we report across the political spectrum rather than from just one perspective.
This surprises me not at all. Many of the links I’ve either found or have been pointed to over the last months that actually contained information have come from overseas, where they’re not filtered through US economic and political interests. The ‘net really is changing the way we as Americans see both the world and ourselves, and I’m quite glad to be around for the shift. Maybe, eventually, we’ll be able to see ourselves as a global culture — I think things like this are the beginning step.