I was once told by “he who knows everything and knows it best” that my knowledge was severely limited because the UK media just plain lies. It tells lies. Where it doesn’t lie, it omits to tell the truth.

I was told this on the basis of an article this guy (it’s always a guy, isn’t it?) about football hooliganism read on a plane highlighting a problem with a UK club that this fellow followed. The violence had not been reported in the UK, or at least, nowhere where this chap had read it.

Aside from the madness of being lectured by someone who knows nothing about the media I consume, who clearly has a very limited consumption himself and on the basis of “foozball” it’s a strange idea in the modern world. Yes, there clearly is a bias within national media to report stuff that is topical and interesting and since most of the people writing in that media are from the country involved, there’s probably more of a bias than any of us recognise at the time.

We just don’t find the same things as exciting or interesting as our neighbours. So I subscribed to a number of different media from around the world and waited to be enlightened.

There really isn’t that much of a difference, truth be told. The UK is desperately interested in who gets to become next PM. No one else really cares too much. The US is desperately interested in the actions and inaction of President Trump and the machinations around the Affordable Healthcare Act. The UK less so. Der Spiegel is interested in Brexit and in the manoeuvrings of Putin, plus the rise of populism as opposed to popularity. And Australia is concerned with China more than seems right or rational to a Brit.

But then there’s some international crisis such as the malware cyber attack yesterday which has obviously had a huge impact almost everywhere, and at home has hit the NHS hard.

A new strain of ransomware — malicious software that encrypts a computer’s files and then demands payment to unlock them — spread rapidly around the world on Friday. This map shows tens of thousands of Windows computers that were taken hostage by the software, a variant of the WannaCry ransomware

Since the UK is pretty transparent about our disasters and talks about them in English, the US media has lots of information and seems to have run with the story. Most damage is said to have occurred in Russia, but translating those stories, once you’ve found them, is pretty expensive for the mainstream media outlets. So the US talks of the crappy NHS tech systems not being updated, the underlying tech code being probably sourced from code stolen by from the American secret services, the NSA, so providing both an excuse to bash the British health system (“Just look what happens with socialised medical care!) and a perverse but very real sense of pride in the amount of damage created by a dangerous American product.

In the UK, we’ve also run with the crappy NHS side of the story, because there’s nothing a Brit likes more than knocking their own society, but mitigated also by the story of a guy who sees to have become the accidental hero of the piece. The malware code included an off switch of sorts whereby the code looked up a site (non-existent domain name) for no apparent reason. A British coder, seeing this though to buy up the domain ($15) and make it live, at which point thousands of references came through to the site and virus spread was halted.
The plucky Brit saves America narrative never appears in America.