The Britpack invasion

British journalists succeed in the States, but not for reasons that American rivals admire

Bashir, 42, has been a reporter for ABC since September last year, and finds himself in interesting company. The US boasts a tribe of British journalists who have left their mark on the culture, for good or ill, ever since PG Wodehouse began working in New York in 1904.

Since then, Brits have colonised the nation's supermarket tabloids and achieved prominence across its newspapers and magazines. For every familiar name - Tina Brown, former editor of the New Yorker, and her husband Sir Harry Evans, who ran Random House publishers; Glenda Bailey, editor of Harper's Bazaar; political writer Christopher Hitchens - scores more quietly get on with the business of selling news and entertainment to Americans.

One title alone tells you much of what you need to know about what we do better than the Americans. Since Paul Field, a former executive at The Sun, left Wapping for the editorship of the National Enquirer last year, he has taken nearly two dozen British hacks with him.

How are Brits seen by their native rivals? David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, spent seven years as a Murdoch journalist in New York. He says the best thing to do is keep quiet about where you come from. "When I got there, I soon realised that the really successful journalists didn't shout about being British."

Even if Bashir follows those ground rules, he will face a challenge. Before he utters his first welcome on Nightline, rival commentators are on the attack. His offence? The tactics he used to persuade Michael Jackson to give an interview that almost led to the singer's jailing for child molestation. As a witness at the Jackson trial, I saw the reporter torn apart as a result of his kindly words to the man he was planning to blow away.

The verdict last week of Fox News's Roger Friedman on Bashir's new job was not untypical. He expressed grave reservations about his method of "getting headline-making answers. Watching Bashir is a "weird and awful experience," said Friedman.

"US journalists are upset at the way he coached Jackson and persuaded him he was his best friend," says Justin Webb, the BBC's Washington correspondent. "What he did doesn't seem a particularly awful sin, but that's not how things are seen here."

The problem for Bashir is that his methods fit a US stereotype of British hacks. For two generations, we have dominated the staffs of the Enquirer and its rivals, the nation's least respected and most salacious titles. UK tabloids have bred generations of hacks with an over-generous supply of cunning and a cut-throat ability to get stories. This is largely because UK papers are so competitive.

In the US, on the other hand, a typical city has one newspaper. There is only one truly national title, USA Today and at the top of the market, The New York Times and The Washington Post are far too gentlemanly to slug it out.

As a result, if the US needs a dash of killer instinct, it makes sense to import it from the UK. This gives us something of a reputation, and British journalists attempting something a little more respectable are sometimes tainted.

Speak to the British Enquirer types and you hear that very few American reporters can cut it. "We are more aggressive at tracking down stories and because of that we tend to catch the Americans by surprise," says Fleet Street veteran Gary Morgan, who set up Splash, a paparazzi news agency, 15 years ago in Los Angeles.

Brian Hitchen, a former Daily Star editor who worked on the Enquirer 30 years ago, concurs: "People would bad-mouth the English and say we made it all up. But that was total bullshit: the Americans just tend not to have the same investigative skills that are bred into UK journalists."

Hitchen is still proud of his contribution to journalistic history. When he was the paper's picture editor in 1977, the Enquirer ran the headline: "Elvis, The Untold Story". The star had died a few days earlier and the front-page picture still lives on in the US collective memory.

There, in close-up, resting peacefully without a hair out of place, was Presley, dead in his coffin. Hitchen had provided a mourner with a camera and the promise of a large cheque.