There are 330 million of us, too. The vast majority can be reasonable people and that still leaves millions of batshit crazy Americans out there to write about.

Edit: typo

For what it’s worth to was in college in the late 2000s early 2010s and parents coming to party wasn’t really a thing at my university (private, research university).

That being said, both my parents died when I was a young child so I would’ve given anything to have some drinks with them as adults on equal footing. I don’t particularly find it odd that parents (humans too, after all) want to occasionally let loose.

"Dog Bites man" doesn't make headlines, but "Man Bites Dog" does. You'd probably be aghast at what sort of British and Australian news manages to make it to the States.

This is exactly right. It is sort of like the trope that all Brits are drunk all of the time on vacation in Spain.

It isn't true in general, but wow, that 1% where it is true are very loud and obnoxious.

Media in general, but American media especially, is hyper optimized for clickbait. Informing people about news and current events is useful, but inducing outrage is _profitable_. Newsrooms across the country have realtime metrics dashboards showing what stories are doing numbers, and its not meeting minutes of local PTA meetings.

All incentives drive journalists to search out stories designed to light up your monkey brain, and a byproduct of that is every stereotype under the sun is magnified and distorted into a caricature.

From what I know of UK and Australia, I'm pretty sure you have parents who would do Jell-O shots at 10am too.

Is “totally normal guy does nothing out of the ordinary” a headline in Australia?

It works the other way as well. More or less everything I know about the UK I learned from watching "Spitting Image", both the original as a child and the more recent revival.

> I can only assume that American media is an environment in which only the very most extreme and grotesque representations can break through.

Pretty much this. Our media is hyper-optimized for what drives clicks/views/subscriptions, and it turns out that nothing drives those things so much as showing outrageous behavior, rather than trying to portray what is typical. You can see it in our political culture as well: if you listen to the media, every single member of (insert other side here) is a step below Hitler on the evil scale. But if you talk to people across the political spectrum, you will find that the vast majority are good, decent people who share your same values and merely disagree on how to best reach them.

I genuinely think that the media is responsible for most of the social issues in our country, and if we could get rid of them we would be significantly better off.

"The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn't worry about it." — Bruce Schneier

I've heard Britons complain about the local chavs walking their kids to school while wearing pyjamas and drinking a can of beer.

It's sad that those outside America think negatively of us (while in Iceland I met Europeans who felt the same) because of horrid media that a lot of it is made up crap and lies especially in politics (on all sides). I am sure to get downvoted and by other Americans for saying this as I've said many times here for years and it gets downvoted. Yet one argument that other Americans are feeling the same is via who the 47th US president will be. A president who I never voted for but has been strung up left/right/sideways by his opposition yet all that mattered zero and was ignored. Their political games got tiresome and didn't work yet more importantly though is inflation and no doubt people were paying less for things when the idiot was in office. Wages skyrocketed during covid to get ppl back to work causing things to get more expensive to pay for higher wages is one reason things are more expensive.

The United States is a big fuckin place. If you don't want to have your world view challenged by other cultures, you can travel up to 3300 miles and still find people who think quite a bit the way you do - And that's without including Alaska.

So if you encounter Americans outside of America, and they aren't holding guns, you're already in a pretty filtered group. Like anybody, some of us don't discover how uncomfortable being out of your comfort zone is until you try, and they revert to their lesser selves. But at least they tried.