I was wondering the same. Whenever I'm in the states, I don't find the media to be particularly different...read a NYT or a WSJ paper and you'll get a lot of international news, positive and negative. As always, if you want news, you have to go looking for it. It just isn't going to be hand fed into your mouth.

I do not for the life of me get CNN and the 24 hour news cycle, though. It just seems to be all noise for news on cable TV. Anyways, still better than what I can get in the country I currently live in (China), but there is always the Internet (even with the GFW in place).