They bused an assortment of Iraqis back to their hotel after a day of sightseeing historic places in town. And I stuck around interpreting for one of the artists ..
Long story short. The Iraqis gathered in the hotel lobby where the TV was set to Fox news and, I must say, a day's worth of diplomacy was undone with one hour of the O'Reilly Factor.
I am all for freedom of expression, but Fox News is something I rather keep in the U.S. Fox can broadcast overseas as long as they supply traveling and expat Americans with Canadian-flag backpack badges.
It's just embarrassing, eh.
Many of my friends and colleagues here at home are some of the most wonderful, intelligent, caring people I have met anywhere on the globe, and it does them a great injustice to let people around the world judge the US based on what they see or hear on TV.
It's the responsibility of those of us that travel to spread the good word of the reasonable US Citizen!
I'm not really interested in being friends with someone who would dislike me due to someone there's a 75% chance (totals + participation) I didn't vote for. Which doesn't even begin to scrape the surface of the importance of knowing and talking to people with opposing views in the first place.
The international perspective is quite a bit different from that of Americans. I don't mean that (only) in the sense that we tend to be America-centric. It's also in the way the stories are told, and indeed what stories lead and how much time is spent on them.
I can't recall any specific examples, and it wasn't obvious on just a short viewing, but over a period of time I was very much struck by the difference.
There are badly-behaved people on television shows around the world; to conclude that such people represent their native countries in any meaningful sense is naive at best.
It doesn't show any advertising - where the US has ad breaks, the UK feed shows information screens with weather and financial information etc. I'm not entirely sure why it's there, to be honest.
Some friends in this country get worked up about Glenn Beck on Twitter but I just find it really hard to care about the rantings of a man on a foreign TV channel, to be perfectly honest. I'm sure there are other TV channels in other countries that are far worse.
I always treated Fox News as comedy, to be honest. I'd like to watch it in Canada, but having to pay an extra couple of bucks to them directly is not agreeable to me (it's not a free channel on my cable package here).
For the English speaking countries at least, I have always assumed that there was a core audience agreeable to the views portrayed by Fox News, hence why it is shown. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
But I guess I figure a safe assumption to make in most situations involving musings on the motives of publicly owned corporations is that money and relatively shortsighted plans to acquire more of it tend to trump most else. e.g. Foxtel in Australia shows John Stuart and Stephen Colbert most weeknights. Not I suspect, because the execs at Fox agree with their POV but because there is an audience for that POV and the execs can spend their money in more places than they can spend their moral conviction in their position on the political spectrum.
I would think these two goals are very well aligned.