It kinda makes it seem like the entire world is a flawless masterpiece where no crime exists and crime only happens in the US. And you can’t convince me that it’s true, pretty sure shit happens in Europe almost as much as the US, even if a bit less.

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  3. 1) it affects us more / hits closer to home

    2) We have a hard time focusing on more than one thing at a time

  4. I’m assuming you live in the US?

    If so it shouldn’t be surprising that news networks focus more on US news and less on international news. And drama sells, so bad news gets more focus than good news.

  7. Because there’s been a long term, consistent effort to demonize the US and make it like European countries, Australia, etc. We’re pretty much the last major developed nation where a few specific rights exist and there’s an active agenda to get rid of them.

    The right to free speech as we know it in the US doesn’t exist in most other countries and really no other country has gun rights like we do.

  8. I get how you feel. I noticed this during the height of Covid, when New Zealand made it their national sport to gloat over the US how much better they were doing at containing the virus. I don’t begrudge them their success in that arena, but every Kiwi online was so goddamn smug about it. That might’ve been fun except for the fact that real people in the US were suffering and dying from the disease. It wasn’t a joke, but they had no problem laughing at us anyway.

    But I think it’s important to consider things from their point of view, and for a small country it must be absolutely maddening having to share a world with the US. Some country on the other side of the planet floods your country with its culture; makes foreign policy decisions without your input that affect your life; makes economic decisions that benefit itself while negatively affecting millions. Hell, if the US decided to it could unilaterally wipe out all life on earth while remaining blithely unaware of who populates most of it. Imagine how much resentment that must generate, and how good it must feel to finally get to stick it to the Empire for once.

    So yeah, I get it. That doesn’t mean I like it. I wish that New Zealand could’ve found a way to enjoy their rugby games and sheep without taking a dig at people suffering in my country, but I get it.

    EDIT: THIS is the comment that got me a suicide concern message!?!? FFS.

  9. You hear about everything through global propaganda outlets (the news media) run by globalists, who create the script and decide what you can and can’t know. Stop watching their “entertainment” news broadcasts and become a better informed global citizen. Connect with people directly! And if such individuals are products of the media, cut them off! Hence, our only salvation is when “self-thinking, autonomous individuals” from all over the world network to pool their experiences, observations and talents. Then, reach out to better inform the world.

  10. We are used to a lot of American content. Probably around 75% of our entertainment comes from the US (I’m pulling that number out of my sleeve, idk how much it is, but it’s a lot).

    America is also an enormous country that has a lot of influence on things that happen in the world. So yeah, if Biden dies tomorrow, we will (and want to) know that the very second.

    There is also a lot of shit happening in Europe. But since we have a lot of small countries, it seems to happen all over the place. The opposite is also true. According to our news, that gay club shooting happened in the US. The state is irrelevant to us. But you got a lot of states and a lot of place were things can happen. But it’s always “the US”.
    In Europe, its always “in France, in Spain, in Poland, …” but never “in Europe”.

  12. As I always like to say: “The US is a stinking shithole, but for some reason everybody wants to come here.”

  14. I notice this as well for British news. I’m studying in Europe for a year and their media is obsessed with British politics and the Royal Family.

    I think it’s because English is very widely spoken across the whole world. Negative news about, for example, Sweden is only going to be reported in Swedish unless it’s bad enough to attract international interest.

    The US is also just a big country so there are more people to share news as well.

  16. Everyone here is missing the obvious answer. Most of us are in the US, watching American news. Of course it’s going to focus more on the US then other countries.

  17. Good news doesn’t sell nearly as well as bad news. That’s why I follow the Good News Network so I don’t feel such existential dread.

  18. I think you aren’t watching world news.

    Plenty of us hear about things going wrong in other countries.

    I mean, you aren’t going to get stories about mass shootings, and the murder rates aren’t comparable.

    Wouldn’t really be interesting to hear about traffic in Helsinki or Paris. I barely pay attention to traffic here. It’s ugly and peoplely out, I already know that.

    But when foreign former Presidents get charged with crimes, that makes the news.

  19. It’s kind of our fault. They report good news and no one reads it. They report bad and we all read it.

    It’s kind of a biological survival mechanism. We have to know about all the threats before it’s too late!

  21. Bad news is more profitable than good news. Just turn on your evening news and for every good news story there are 10 doom and gloom pieces. I quite watching the news on TV when I kept hearing ‘coming up, find out what’s in your home that might be slowly killing you’. They kept repeating it over and over until the very end and it was a common dish cleaner that can kill you…if ingested.

  22. everyone speaks english. A weird story has to be a lot bigger to make it out of say, German or Polish local news into the international media than it does in the US or UK.

  23. Do you really want to know?

    The world *loves* hearing about negative US news. They don’t like hearing about their own flaws at all. Just yesterday, there was a commenter on a sub who said that no one in Europe gets arrested for doing lewd things to statues. That obviously is completely false since vandalism and lewdness charges exist in basically every country, including in Europe. Another example was the Panama Papers, there were people foaming at the mouth (definitely here on Reddit for sure) that there was going to be a great expose’ of American corruption It turns out that there were almost no Americans using the Panamanians and more Euros than Asians named innthe leaks. Then, for some unknown raisin, the Papers just slowly got pushed out of the limelight. Weird. Everyone loves to think they live in a great place and that the US is a dystopia hellscape. Have for almost 250 years. They despise hearing about their own flaws.

  24. If you listen to NPR, they were going on and on about the recent climate summit that went on in Egypt. The host agayand again mentioned the the US is by far the worse polluter to the environment. But if you spend five seconds researching you’ll see that China pollutes more than all the western world combined.
    Why did they do this. Why isn’t this called out as climate change denial?

  25. Well, two reasons.

    1) TV News only has so much airtime, which means they run the stories that catch the eyeballs, and

    2) The internet sends you stories based on your past reading history.

  26. I learn about world news from a publication El País. If you want, they also have an English division. Other than that, there are tons of English world news, or other publications that have English divisions.

  28. I’ve noticed this when it comes to the BBC’s website:

    ^^Bad ^^thing ^^in ^^Europe

    Bad thing in Africa

    #BAD THING IN AMERICA! OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW BAD IT IS THERE??!!

  29. Because this is the US and so most of our news is going to be about us. I’m pretty sure if you go to another country most of the news will be about them.

    Start subscribing to the BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN World News (the print version not the TV broadcast), Reuters. You can download the Google News app and personalize your feed with the sources you want. That way you can read the news you’re interested in instead of just what the US media spoonfeeds you.

  30. It’s just a reflection of what people want to see. People apparently gravitate towards America bad content, so that’s what is shown.

    On the flip side, people seem to want some sort of utopian view of Scandinavian countries, so you’ll generally hear mostly good things coming out of those countries.

  31. >why is it when something goes wrong anywhere in the world we never hear about it

    We all live in our own bubbles and there are vastly different sources and quality of information these days. What global news do you regularly consume and what local news do you regularly consume?

    We hear a lot more about what’s wrong in the US because we live in the US.

  32. NPR often plays an hour or so of BBC world news and sometimes I have to turn it off because it’s so depressing.

  34. I live in Germany and last week there was a murder/suicide in a nearby village, in which 4 people died. I just now verified it was never a topic of discussion on r/germany and r/de. A mass murder in one of the safest countries in Europe, but nobody has anything to say.

    Meanwhile, every negative thing that happens in the US gets dissected to death in European media and subreddits.

  35. Media doesn’t make money to tell you boring facts of everyday life. They get views by showing controversial stories that may or may not be true.

  36. What sources are you getting your news from? If it’s American tv or website it makes sense to cover primarily American topics. If you watch other countries news it will be 75% news about their country or neighborhoods.

    The reason the news is mostly negotiable because that is what gets the most engagement. Ads fund most of the internet and engagement is what is measured when determining how much to charge the advertisers.

  37. It’s been documented that platforms run by American companies front load the content with stuff from America. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a combination of laziness and the fact that foreigners keep *clicking* on shitshow stories from the US. In the age of the algorithm, we kind of all have ourselves to blame, for some extent, for the drivel we are shown.

    Edit: Also the “if it bleeds it leads” effect. Several years ago, a teenager attending a magnet high school for kids interested in the medical fields demonstrated a gynological surgical procedure that had been posted for years, but nobody thought it could be pulled off because it required so much finesse. He hooked up his Xbox controller to the simulator instead of the conventional controls, and with the hours and hours of muscle memory he had built up picking locks in Elder Scrolls, he mastered it. Once he demonstrated that it COULD be done, it inspired some actual surgeons to revisit it, and now it is in use.

    But I can’t remember this kid’s name because I saw one article about it. Somewhere around the same time that Cho kid shot some people at Virginia Tech, but the media made sure THAT asshole’s name is etched into my memory for life.

  38. I think a few things are going on here. Culturally the US is open and adversarial within itself. This draws interest, interest draws eyes and eyes boost ratings. The other is the infrastructure of News, the US has several apparatuses (?appurtenances? apparati? The Latin word with an anglicized plural feels weird) CNN, MSNBC, and Fox spin out tons of content and it’s picked up on Twitter which then goes into a feedback loop. BBC and NPR are far more measured and less ratings driven.

  39. They are all connected, news effects other countries. Politically that is. Crime and shootings are symptomatic of Corporate Welfare Captialism. Socialist countries mock the US for treating its citizens so poorly, ripping us off through health insurance and poor education and lack of access to birth control (prevents abortions). Europe is shinning a light on the US because our lobbied government fails to represent and act in the interest of the people so the people are damaged by violence, mental illness and substance abuse.

  41. Bad governments love to tell their citizens how bad things are (when they aren’t) to make sure you are just scared enough to trust in the government to provide more security and less privacy.

  42. Media bias.
    You also need to realize that America is a global superpower. So if something happens there, it often gain more attention

  43. Because a lot of people in the us and the works think my stupid country is more important. It’s not. We are all important.

  44. In the US, the media is mostly ad-supported, and increasingly online. If you aren’t enticed to click on the story, there’s no ad to show you, so the content provider doesn’t get paid. There is therefore an economic incentive for them to put stories in front of you that you’re most likely to click on. Basic human psychology demands that we look at things that trigger our fears or outrage or righteous validation. So that’s all you see coming out of US media providers.

  45. I currently live in Japan and I’m 99% sure there’s prostitution going on near the station where I work.

    If this was in the US somebody probably would have written an article about it by now.

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