I think the Euros have perspectives that are just as valid as anyone else'. I mean, Americans get their ideas from the pop media too, and then we experience life through that lens. Americans are not somehow less susceptible to pop media influence than, say, Europeans, simply by virtue of being Americans. We are just as manipulated as they are. Probably more manipulated, since we consume more of our pop media.
The media changes the perspective of people. The perspective becomes the reality. Doesn't matter who those people are, or where they happened to grow up. The media you consume, shapes your perspective, which becomes reality for you. No one is immune to it. This is deeply ingrained psychological stuff. With several decades worth of study to back it up. (Along with countless billions in profits derived from exploiting that very human proclivity.)
To say that the European perspective is invalid because they didn't grow up here, would be like saying that Americans don't have valid perspectives on life in Europe or China, because we didn't grow up in any of those nations. Well, maybe we didn't, but we can have a perspective that is as valid as anyone else'. Doesn't make our perspective more "right" than anyone else', but I'd hardly say that our perspective on those nations is outright "wrong" just because we didn't grow up in them.
Of course they are! Propaganda is much less effective when you constantly see conflicting evidence with your own lying eyes.
There is a reason why trust in the mainstream media is at an all time low in the US.
Are you implying that Europeans can't see through propaganda? That, somehow, only Americans have this gift?
I’m saying reality is a hell of an antidote to propaganda.
I’m certain French people are far better at recognizing biased and misleading reporting concerning France than I am.
Pop culture, news, and books give an incredibly limited and skewed perspective of what a country is actually like. Worse yet, if you remove these things from their context and then give them to someone who has a different culture, you end up missing large chunks. American pop culture is also stripped of realism and specificity to make it more broadly accessible to Americans and even abroad.
To draw a comparison which might be more familiar to the HN crowd, consider what happens when you learn programming by reading a bunch of blog posts, articles, and books about programming, but you never actually write a single line of code. You’ll have a very distorted idea of what programming or software engineering is like.
I’ve had similar conversations with both groups of people. A novice programmer might have an arrogant attitude and explain to me why the code base is terrible, or might have the attitude of a learner and ask me questions about the design decisions. A European might have an arrogant attitude and explain to me what the problems are with American race relations, or they could be more humble and ask me questions about what living in America is like.