Quote:
Originally Posted by CDSmith
Don't get me wrong, when my country (Canada) does something to deserve criticism I'm often the first one to step up and dish it out, and I don't fault anyone in any other country who wants to dish it out either. People are entitled to their opinions.
But the US is in a bit of a unique position, in that much of it's foreign policy actually does affect the rest of the world, thus I find it hard at times to fault non-US citizens from offering up their opinions on certain US-related issues.
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there is another side to "america" that the rest of the world fails to grasp much in the same way americans can't seem to grasp much outside their own borders. its that they have an opinion about america for a lot of reasons. for good or bad, better or worse, people in the world have a great deal more exposure to "america" than america does to the rest of the world.. whether its bush's next embarassing speech, propaganda, coke commercials, economics/the Dollar, international tensions, isreal, NATO, movies, music, levis or incessant reports about britney spears every bowel movement or whatever.
americans don't see 20-30-40% of the news on their own tv stations being about every country in the world... but every country in the world has news about america daily. i lived almost a decade in russia and traveled extensively through europe and the world and always found it very odd that there was so much news about "america" everywhere. even in russia, probably 30% of the news is about "america", celebs, music, politics etc. americans just don't get that same exposure to everywhere else.
thats particularly true of Canada.. even more so than anywhere else probably. i used to live right on the Canadian border and watch a lot of Canadian tv and always thought it was odd that Canada reports a lot of news in the US... almost as if its local news... i.e. "a woman in las vegas today did a funny thing......." but you will never see US news reporting on Canada unless its something thats truly an international news story.