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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

I was once in a feel-good Arab-American lovefest summit where influential Arabs were being shown around NYC and DC at the behest of Karen Hughes and the Bush administration. I was in it for the free food.

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.

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I know your last comment was in jest, but as someone from the US that travels a lot, I would like to mention that I think it is really important for educated/reasonable US Citizens to engage with locals and other travelers while abroad and let people know that what they see on Fox News (et al) isn't all we have to offer!

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!

Somewhat tangentially, it's interesting to watch news when traveling abroad. Even aside from Fox, the stuff you're like to see is quite a bit different even from CNN.

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.

I couldn't agree more. I traveled to Croatia a few years ago and stayed with locals. One of the first things each of them said was some variation of "I don't like George Bush." Simply saying "I don't either" brightened them up considerably.

It's kind of sad to be so narrowly defined by politics like that.

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.

If this is more than just hyperbole on your part, it reflects poorly on your guests.

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.

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