Freebase Dali

Well, as a general rule, a person should probably take American media with a grain of salt. Not that most of it is outright lies or anything (although it's not unheard of), but things tend to be reported in contexts that support an political agenda, and anything happening that doesn't support it is often just not reported on.
The result is usually a skewed perception of what's really going on. I'm increasingly a firm believer that American media is less an informative resource that journalism used to be, and more a political resource which abandons the principles journalism used to stand for in favor of affecting its viewers/readers in such a way as to bolster that political base.

Because of this, I think there's a very large tendency for things to be reported a certain way, and that might get interpreted not only in our own country, but abroad, to signify a particular state of being. And ultimately, a lot of conclusions are made based solely on spin, unless people are willing to personally carry out fact-checking, which I think most of us in the US can agree is probably not the case.

Honestly, it's the next best thing to mind control. It works too.