More accurately, 80% of them have no idea how the foreign media portrays the way their government represents them abroad. Don't make the mistake of assuming that your giant government-associated news corporations full of hard-ideological reporters and editors are any more trustworthy than Americans'.

You're making it too simple.

You may find the case of the US embassy in Oslo instructive. That building is located quite close to the castle and the other embassies, on a major thoroughfare, and has suffered much poor press because they insisted on closing off half the road due to security concerns.

The press has not been favourable to the embassy. But the commuters (that street is/was a major commuter route from the posh western suburbs) don't just read about the traffic problems, they experience them every morning. Of course it didn't help when the newspapers printed headlines like "Americans refuse to move to <quiet backwater>, insist on continued traffic chaos." But the traffic chaos existed and was directly noticeable.

(The situation was eventually defused. The embassy will move.)

I'll give you that our State Department's grotesque levels of incompetence and stupidity don't exactly make it hard for the foreign press to smear the United States; I find it entirely plausible that the same people who couldn't be bothered to put bulletproof glass on a consulate in Libya would try to turn a European ally's capital into an armed camp. That being said, I've still too often seen stories in foreign papers painting perfectly anodyne American actions as the height of villainy to have any more faith in their reporting than I do in American papers'.

Oh, sure. No doubt at all.

I always imagined that the U.S. negotiates abroad rather like Darth Vader negotiates with Lando Calrissian.

"I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."

"Perhaps you believe you are being treated unfairly?"

Does that make me part of the 80%, or the 20%?

When all you consume, day in and day out, is propaganda, it becomes reality for you.

I spent 6 years living abroad and got to see the perception of the USA (south america counts as "americans" too) -- in the media in foreign countries, including some discussions of politics with people in europe and south america.

I can answer your puzzle very simply: The media in the USA is controlled by the FCC to a high degree, and all we get to consume inside this country is propaganda of one sort or another. From Fox news to CNN to MSNBC to your local affiliate, you get a very slanted, very consistent take on the news.

John Stewart used to run clips of various reporters reporting on the same story and using the exact same words. This was supposed to be funny- but the thing is, this is because the government manufactures the news for us. Investigative journalism is basically a dead art. And the places that do it still (like Rolling Stones coverage of the housing bubble) are basically putting forth political propaganda pieces as if they were investigative journalism.

The media is not controlled by the FCC in the way you imply. There is no evidence of it and to suggest it is ridiculous. It's accurate to say it's controlled by corporations, who have their own reasons that do seemingly align very well the status quo of current politicians, but that's not to say the news media is in any way coerced. There are plenty of simple, rational reasons why this would be the case.

The reason you see the same lines from channel to channel is because these news outlets buy their stories. They are pre-written and arranged and often include video footage. They do this because original reporting is expensive and it's silly for a hundred reporters to cover the same unimportant subject when a single person can do it and sell it to others. Everyone wins, but it does result in many places not altering the script very much to make it more original. To suggest this is a government plot is silly. Again there is no evidence of this.

You realize the FCC is almost entirely staffed by people from those corporations, right? And if they haven't already worked in the industry they have a standing job offer to do so.

Double plus good comment, comrade. Absolutely absurd that there could be propaganda or control, after all, if that were the case, we would have heard about it, right!

PS- Prove there is no evidence.

PPSS- A negative four vote count on an article pointing out that the media in the USA is mostly propaganda (on a site which bans people who disagree with the sites desired narrative) is... well, super ironic, and a form of a badge of pride.

Operation Mockingbird never went away, it just got a new name...