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.