I try to spend real time living outside of America every year. It started as a slightly eccentric experiment in on the ground sentiment filtering as the pandemic dragged on.
I wanted to get outside of the informational bubble of being inside the America media’s production timezone. You probably don’t realize it but hard news mostly runs on American timezones.
And while it is exhausting to be inside it, the bigger issue is that American news drowns out the rest of the world and its news. It distorts everything around it.
I sometimes need to get outside the din of the American worldview to really get a sense of what is happening in the world. I can hear real sentiment more clearly outside. Signal can always get through the noise of living in the worlds largest media market and dominant timezone.
Our celebrity culture coupled with English language domination of television and the internet means American news (and its adjacent distribution & amplification businesses) means our media reaches the world more than the world reaches America.
I’m not saying our politics or news always makes it to Americans or the rest of the world. Sure some state news subsidized outlets exist but this stands to change a little as Voice of America, NPR and PBS have funding struggles.
It’s more the cultural product of media and its noise that hamper its consumption in America. We have too much of a good (bad) thing and it’s impossible to fully tune out. We export so much culture it’s a glut.