I lived in the USA for nearly 30 years and traveled widely across the nation during that time, meeting all manner of people from different walks of life. The thing that struck me most forcefully was the complete disconnection between people's conception of the USA and the reality. Somehow, ordinary US citizens have a Disneyesque mental model of their nation in which all awkward facts are either totally unknown or airbrushed out. Most US citizens have no clue that their country is as corrupt as Italy and Greece, for example. Nor do they grasp the extent to which the wealthy and powerful own the government and ensure that it (especially the Republican Party) generates endless legislation to favor their interests at the expense of 99% of the population. Nor do US citizens have any clue about US actions in the rest of the world unless they are presented as "freedom-creating" benevolent interventions in far-away places.

The USA is insulated on both sides by vast oceans and it dominates its neighbors. This means there's no real pressure for ordinary people to know anything at all about the rest of the world. When US citizens go abroad (and only a small percentage ever do) they mostly go either to Mexico where they remain inside carefully-constructed bubbles like Cancun, or to the UK where everyone speaks (more or less...) English. The very tiny percentage who venture elsewhere see the world as a cute backdrop for selfies but no more than that. Thus there's no motivation to know anything about anywhere else, not least because when you believe your dysfunctional violent nation is "the best in the world" you simply can't conceive of why you'd even want to know about anywhere else. So editors know that attempting to tell US audiences about real things happening elsewhere is a great way to lose people's attention, lose advertising revenue, and ultimately to lose one's job. Unless something can be dressed up to look like a clip from a Hollywood movie, no one will watch. And so, US citizens are almost entirely ignorant of everything of importance. I've talked to babushki in Russian villages who know more about world affairs than the typical middle-class US citizen, who would find it impossible to draw a map of the world and equally impossible to name more than three foreign leaders.