On the media difference between Britain and America, from a former Brit who swapped the UK for Chicago. It has the ring of truth!

The British are drowned in world news and current affairs like an oozing puss of global pain and suffering. It is almost as if the evening family meal can’t be served until the household is fed a healthy spoon of African famine, American condescension, French skullduggery and terrorist propaganda. Ah! The BBC! Not just Benny Hill reruns!

My frustrated efforts to gather news outside the rather large borders of the United States – the bigger world beyond Hollywood, gay marriage debates and Jerry Springer – were lacking, to put it mildy.

Then I hear the frequently and annoyingly over-used excuse; ‘but the U.S. is so big!’. So is the bloody world! Yet little Europe is made aware of the global angst from sunrise to sunset.

Fox News, the bastion of lightweight jingoism, gives you 24×7 coverage of a missing teenager in Aruba but the world only gets ‘80 seconds’. MSNBC tackles the claptrap of Washington politics with a wonderfully snide bedside manner. And so much for CNN! They have CNN International for those outside the insular walls of the United States and CNN-Lite for those trapped within the twilight zone of myopic news editors.

From the first week off the boat (or plane) and into the U.S., I came to the painful realization that it’s not America’s fault they’re so blissfully ignorant of the world beyond the fifty states. Americans are so conditioned to the notion of a four time zone world that they just gave up wondering about the other missing twenty hours!