Hooray for the sugar-free BBC

Soon after the 11 September terror attacks, American flags started cropping up everywhere in the United States, including on the lapel pins worn by members of the Bush administration. Amazingly, the symbol was briefly adopted by television correspondents, too. The White House reporter for ABC News wore a lapel pin identical to those of the people he was covering. The Washington bureau chief of NBC wore a red- white- and- blue ribbon during an interview with Vice President Dick Cheney.

Within days, the main networks told reporters to lose the pins, which, they feared, suggested a political tilt toward President Bush. The only national reporters who wear them today are on the Fox News Channel, known for its conservative leanings.

But an invisible flag-waving persists on American television. A CNN call-in show recently phrased its question of the day with an undeniable slant: "Is it unpatriotic to speak out against the war?" And the veteran ABC correspondent Sam Donaldson reminded a representative of al-Jazeera, the Arab-language television station: "A lot of people in the US don't like the idea that al-Jazeera broadcasts Osama's messages to the Arab world."

There have been some refuseniks. One, Tom Brokaw, anchor of NBC Nightly News, declared: "I don't think a journalist ought to be wearing a flag, because it does seem to be, to me at least, a sign of solidarity toward whatever the government is doing, and that is not our role."

But the generally blinkered view on US television helps explain why more Americans are turning to BBC World News and other foreign-based, English-language programmes, which are increasingly available here. The British programmes report the same facts, but without the sugar-coating.

Although BBC World News is the farthest-reaching and best of the programmes, some viewers are also loyal to ITN's World News for Public Television, a daily half-hour show produced in England for American audiences.

Since 11 September, the ratings for both have increased substantially (50 per cent for ITN), suggesting a hunger for a wider range of stories and a more straightforward tone.

BBC World News, a half-hour programme taken live from BBC World, the corporation's international TV channel, appears five times daily on BBC America, a four-year-old channel available mostly on cable. It is more easily available on the non-commercial Public Broadcasting system; one of its New York stations carries the programme three times a day and syndicates it across the country.

In its biggest coup, the BBC got two reporters into Kabul last week, while no American reporters were in the city even as the Taliban fled and the Northern Alliance entered on Monday. But the fundamental difference is not about scoops but tone - the soft American and the sterner English approach. The difference was most evident when Western reporters were taken on a Taliban-guided tour of southern Afghanistan recently. On BBC World, speaking before the Taliban lost Kabul, Simon Ingram wrapped up his four-day experience as cameras showed a crowd of village men in turbans, their fists raised in anger while armed soldiers look on. "Within the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, evidence of the challenge Washington is facing," he said. The men "chant their allegiance to the government, and death to America. No sign here that the intensifying American bombardment is achieving its goal."

ABC's Dan Harris, who was on the same tour, also pointed out that the villagers were angry at America. But he emphasised how friendly they were to him. "It's not that they're not bitter about the almost daily US bombings," he said, in a warm and affable tone. "They simply don't blame individual Americans." A Taliban spokesman said that Osama bin Laden should not be turned over "to Americans who are killing our innocent people", but Harris ended the report: "Most people, however, preferred more pleasant conversation. Before we left, one Taliban soldier smiled and said he wanted to leave with us and go to America."

From the time the anti-terror coalition was formed, the BBC has offered a stark view of its fragility - an issue to which the American media have only now, belatedly and intermittently, begun to pay attention. In the midst of covering anthrax, the English-based programmes have continued to report regularly from Jerusalem and the West Bank, while the Middle East has become a footnote on the American evening news. And the differences are not only war-related. When Bush spoke about the economic downturn recently, American networks assumed a tone of cautious pessimism, while the BBC reporter said, "even the President is forced to admit" that the economic future looks "very grim".

For years, American television has been criticised for overlooking world news, and the consequences of that lapse are freshly obvious. After the terrorist attacks, the media were flooded with stunned, baffled reports that asked, "Why do they hate us?" Yet even as American reporters flood into Pakistan and Afghanistan, they maintain a myopic attitude towards the rest of the world that says, "They'd love us if only they understood us."

That skittishness is understandable. The attacks did happen here, creating a war mentality. But if one of America's goals is to hold together a global coalition, it helps to know what the rest of the globe is thinking.

Caryn James is chief television critic of The New York Times.