Let's pray for a clear result to the US presidential election and then the media can return to one or other of its customary obsessions: paedophilia, foxhunting, global warming, obesity and outbreaks of sentimentality in sundry locations.

Why has the US election been first item on TV news and top of the page in most of the papers? - though I congratulate my colleagues on The Northern Echo for their reasonable restraint. I haven't caught sight of scores of US journalists turning up on full expenses to cover parish council elections in Durham, or even to make sure there's been no cheating over the choosing of the Lord Mayor here in London.

In a famous painting of the Last Judgement there is the image of a man descending into hell. He is terrified naturally, but still he can only cover up one eye against the horrors: he keeps the other eye open, because he finds the demons so fascinating.

That picture sums up the media's attitude towards the US. America is fanatically hated for its "imperialism", for its allegedly gung-ho attitude in world affairs and its unrestrained capitalism. But even as the media heaps its ordure on the American soul, it is in thrall to all the most tawdry aspects of American "culture".

When it's the Oscar ceremony, British TV and even the usually po-faced Today Programme on Radio Four, gives this glitzy rubbish top billing on all news bulletins. American filmstars are fawned over and starlets' every marriage bust-up, their every snort of cocaine or attack of bulimia or aborted pregnancy, is scrutinised in the most macabre and adoring style.

It's - to quote an American author - "a Catch 22 situation". The British media adores everything that is trashy about America and hates everything that is good. Take American world leadership, for example - what the right-on (oops!) sub-Trotskyists who run the BBC denounce as "US imperialism". There is nothing wrong with imperialism - have you seen the mess Africa is in now that the western imperialists have gone... or Iran after the Shah... or a dozen other countries that are nothing but piled-high heaps of corruption?

It all depends on whether you have a good empire or an evil one. The USSR was evil, as Ronnie and Maggie told us. The US's influence is mostly benign. The grandeur that was Rome was hated by those who lived under its authority, but those ancient despisers of the Empire were crying for the Caesars to come back when the barbarians arrived to pillage, massacre and destroy.

Now I have raised a subject upon which we might just conjecture for a few minutes this election morning. America has its faults and shortcomings. What nation doesn't? But would you have preferred Nazi Germany? Would you have preferred the USSR? Don't answer that Mr Shaw, Mrs Webb, Mr Philby, Mr Burgess, Mr Benn, Mr Scargill and all your fellow-travellers including The Guardian and the BBC whose current leading documentary makes a moral equivalence between American conservatives and al Qaida. Islamofascists or Uncle Sam - I know which of those is the evil empire.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.