Earlier this month, The New York Times’ Justin Scheck, Eshe Nelson, and Tariq Panja wrote about the “fresh eyes” that were suddenly on an “old scandal” involving Will Lewis, the publisher of The Washington Post: allegations that he covered up the full extent of illegal phone hacking and other unethical reporting practices at Rupert Murdoch’s UK media empire in the early 2010s, when he was supposed to be cleaning up that mess. On Monday, it was Scheck and a colleague, Jo Becker, who published the most forensic look yet at the claims. They found that Lewis’s role remains murky in many respects, but that he gave a “green light” to delete internal emails and that police in London came to view him as an “impediment” to their probe. (He denies wrongdoing.)

The Times’ story was the latest in a string of similar reports in the US press since Lewis tapped Robert Winnett, a fellow Brit, to lead the Post’s newsroom in early June. Journalists dug into Winnett’s deployment of undercover reporters, payments to a source, and alleged writing of stories based on deceptively obtained records; an article in the Post itself tied him to a self-described “thief.” (Winnett did not comment for any of the aforementioned articles in the Times, Post, and Daily Beast.)

In addition to the hacking-coverup claims, Lewis was implicated in several of the stories about Winnett and accused, by The Guardian, of advising the then British prime minister Boris Johnson to “clean up” his phone during a major political scandal. (Lewis denies this too.) Late last week, the Post announced that Winnett will no longer take its top job. Lewis is hanging on for now, but serious questions remain as to whether his position is tenable.

In addition to the stories about Lewis’s and Winnett’s pasts, pundits have homed in on the pair’s nationality, first in the context of a supposed “invasion” of British journalists helming US outlets, including The Wall Street Journal’s Emma Tucker and CNN’s Mark Thompson, then in a wave of alarmed commentary about the perceived laxness of British journalists’ ethics. Some of this commentary has made fair points. Reporters going undercover or paying for information, for example, are more commonly accepted in UK journalism than they would be in American circles.

But even these differences are complicated: such practices are not consensus norms in the UK, and when they are employed these days, it is often on public-interest grounds. (Investigative journalists, for instance, must often go to greater lengths to stand up stories in the UK, which has stricter libel laws than the US.) And at its least nuanced, the commentary around Lewis, Winnett, and their compatriots has smacked of moral panic—focusing, as Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic, on their “‘rough and tumble’ nature” and “backward ways, as if they resembled Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.”

It’s understandable that Post staffers in particular would be concerned about the specifics of Lewis’s and Winnett’s biographies—not least Lewis’s alleged role in the aftermath of the hacking scandal. But the broader idea that Brits don’t understand—or, worse, actively scorn—American journalism’s pristine ethics rests on several, often parochial generalizations about the state of British journalism, and how it has changed in recent years. As Semafor’s Ben Smith put it after Winnett renounced the Post’s top job, “These Brits now exist in pure caricature in the U.S.”

For starters, the stories about Lewis’s and Winnett’s backgrounds are more different from each other than their cumulative weight of controversy suggests. The pair’s roles in paying a whistleblower for a cache of lawmakers’ expenses data in 2009, for example, is certainly debatable from an ethical standpoint, and there appears to be a discrepancy between Lewis’s account of the episode and a source with knowledge of the situation. But the data itself was undeniably in the public interest, and—as James Ball noted last week, in an astute Politico column skewering the idea of an ethical gulf between US and UK journalism—it may not have seen the light of day without the payment, after parliamentary authorities slow-walked its release under public-records laws.

However one sees it, this episode is orders of magnitude less concerning than the allegations that Lewis covered up wrongdoing himself or urged a prime minister to do likewise—conduct that does not comport with journalistic ethics anywhere on the planet. (Again, Lewis denies it.) As Ball suggested after Winnett’s ouster, it’s ironic that he, not Lewis, was the first domino to fall in the Post scandal given that the concerns about the latter are “more serious and more recent.”

Indeed, plenty of coverage of Lewis and Winnett has compared US and UK journalistic standards in the present tense even though much of it relates to things that happened 15 or more years ago. This is not to excuse either man for ever having allegedly based stories on fraudulently obtained records. But British media culture is not static. Crucially, the hacking scandal, whatever Lewis’s role in it, exposed many of the most egregious—not to mention at times illegal—practices to a harsh glare of public scrutiny and a lengthy official inquiry.

As I’ve written in the Columbia Journalism Review, the inquiry did not presage lasting structural reform of the British press, which is hardly some ethical paradise now. And Lewis’s alleged role in covering up the extent of illegal practices at Murdoch titles, of course, remains fair game for scrutiny. But by all accounts, the worst such practices are now a thing of the past in the UK—due to fear of legal exposure, if nothing else. McTague wrote in The Atlantic that British journalism these days is “a more sedate, earnest, and ultimately American environment.”

And neither British nor American journalism has ever been a monolith. It is of course right, given each man’s professional trajectory, that coverage of Lewis and Winnett has compared The Washington Post to pre-inquiry British newspapers. But taking either as a stand-in for an entire media ecosystem’s ethics is selective; swap in Fox News on the US side of the equation and the BBC on the other, and suddenly the US is the country that appears to have the ethics problem. It is probably true, on the whole, that British media and political power players enjoy cozier relationships than their US counterparts. But the US is hardly immune to incestuousness.

On the same day that Winnett stepped back from the Post, for example, CNN reported that Murdoch and Fox News stars past and present have been lobbying Donald Trump as to whom he should pick as his running mate—hardly a posture of ethical detachment. Sure, Sean Hannity is hardly a journalist. But Murdoch employs many actual journalists in the US. Indeed, it was Murdoch who first brought Lewis to the US. If he hadn’t, it is doubtful that the latter’s Post appointment, and the ensuing firestorm of controversy, would ever have happened.

As I’ve reported previously, drawing neat dividing lines between different countries’ media industries—never mind those of two countries that are so intimately connected—is an inexact science. For sure, there are cultural differences. But we also live in a world in which Murdoch is a power broker on both sides of the Atlantic, The New York Times employs so many journalists in the UK that it is practically now a British newsroom in its own right, and The Guardian and other outlets have established beachheads going the other way. By the time Lewis allegedly advised Johnson to “clean up his phone” in 2021, he had worked in American media for the better part of a decade.

Was he then a creature of British journalism? Or US journalism? Or both? Either way, he is accountable for his conduct as a powerful person—not as a crude national stereotype.

One cultural difference that I have observed between US and UK journalism is the role of the media in reporting on itself. In the past, Winnett reportedly spoke of a “remarkable omerta” (code of silence) within the British media industry. Recently, Lewis has been accused of pressuring journalists in his own newsroom and at NPR not to cover the hacking-related allegations against him. (He has denied pressuring his own newsroom; he memorably dismissed David Folkenflik, NPR’s widely respected media reporter, as an “activist.”) This was widely seen as inappropriate in the US, where covering media leaders is an established beat (a fact that Lewis has no excuse not to understand).

Even this transatlantic comparison, however, is nuanced. The media beat is arguably growing in the UK, while at least one outlet—the BBC—has long covered its own controversies with a zeal that would make the Post blush. And as Ball pointed out, it was a British newspaper—The Guardian—that blew open the phone-hacking scandal in the first place, further proof that such conduct was never universally accepted in British journalism.

Indeed, at its very best, British journalism charges at those in power with a hard-nosed irreverence. In that one respect, the best recent news stories about Lewis and Winnett have had a somewhat British spirit. It has, at least, been the sort of coverage Lewis and Winnett might have appreciated—if they weren’t on the receiving end of it.