American media is infotainment. News is ratings-driven, and news that proves popular gets repeated ad nauseam. But in all fairness, only ignorant and dumb people watch a lot of TV, and only the especially dumb focus on CNNFoxMSNBC for all their information.
Keep in mind, though, American ignorance relative to others is often exaggerated – not nonexistent, but exaggerated. One thing people forget is Americans are pretty culturally homogeneous and often don’t speak a language other than English, the lingua franca of world trade and academia. That leaves them unable to understand even many of their neighbors, including many French-speaking Canadians. Almost anyone in Germany, the Netherlands, or even France communicates in English for business, and easily understands the bellowing of even America’s more delightfully retarded media personalities, like Glenn Beck. What Americans don’t see are the more retarded groups in various European countries, including nationalist parties and fascists every bit as retrograde as the Republikan Party at its worst.
Another thing is Americans often come in contact with foreign peoples who self-select as the most educated, and therefore sensible, representatives of their home countries. The fans of the fascists and nationalists that make up the fringes of European political culture are probably like the Republikans in the USA – for the most part, they’re probably too ignorant to care to travel, don’t know languages besides their native one, and therefore don’t really express themselves in a manner that English-speakers would understand – so we don’t perceive their existence.
Long story short, just because our stupidities are obvious to some of us, and it’s obvious that many foreign countries lack our stupidities, don’t assume that other peoples don’t have their own stupidities that may be as bad. Italy still has an openly fascist party that is sometimes welcomed in coalitions with sitting governments, for instance. Ireland bans abortion almost entirely. Germans over-regulate free speech (okay, maybe that’s understandable…). The French get all bent out of shape and butthurt about foreign words entering their language. And look at what the Greeks and other PIIGS did.