I agree to some degree - I lived in Canada for 10 years where I would frequently watch the news (both local and national) and frankly they're just spouting a lot of the same stuff. If it's not explicitly local or Canadian centric, it's like they pull from the same script in the USA.
While I've lived in France and Germany, I didn't watch the news there, so I can't speak for those countries. But it seems to me that the world watches the USA, not their own..... at least for many things.
Yeah I do wonder if it's because the USA in the spotlight. For comparison's sake, you never hear of the Dutch, but as it turns out the Netherlands is the country with the highest amount of phonetaps in the world (this small country of 18 million has more wiretaps going on than the USA at +/- 300 million). Edward Snowden came out and dubbed the Netherlands the 'surveillance kings of europe'.
...which is weird, considering the Netherlands is often used as an example of a western nation with it's affairs in order, friendly & tolerant government, ranking at the top of all kinds of indexes with regards to freedom, democracy, living conditions, and all that. Strange to think that this carebear nation would be into such mass surveillance. Also, you never hear of anything on the news about people being caught through surveillance. At least I don't.
oh wow interesting - I did not know that about NL! Either everyone's behaving because they know about "big brother", or offenses aren't being reported because the USA is more in the spotlight as you suggest... Or maybe the Dutch really are just that good. ;) Fascinating yet disturbing stuff.
Yeah it's not very known.. even in the Netherlands most people don't know it. I was surprised myself when I discovered it!
But I think the key thing is that it appears to be mostly that: surveillance. I think there's no kicking-in-doors and that kind of stuff going on. I do think the Dutch intelligence probably works closely together with the US and I've read several times when apparently some Dutch intelligence was key in aiding the US with regards to some important global issues. Maybe it's like we like to spy, but let the Americans do the actual dirty work?
Well, we do like to think of ourselves as the "world police"... ;)