Last night in Oakland

Americans are isolated indeed. The four sources to get their news: Internet, radio, television and newspaper.

Internet
You can go to any of the big television network's webpage or to a major newspaper webpage to get the latest news. You'll end up having more or less the same you'd see on TV. Maybe they're fresher or more detailed, but the coverage is the same.

Radio

Forget about it. News on the radio doesn't even exist. It is more into things like if Mattress Discounters or Sleeptrain has special offers this week. It seems that Americans only have problems with their mattresses. Everything else is just about fine...

Television and Newspaper
To me they are very similar. Same freshness (at least 12 hours delay), and same content.

And what is that content? "And after this, your local news!" News are called local news for a reason. While the USA is a huge country, there's no real nationwide television channel. Networks like CNBC, ABC or Fox work as a franchise company. There're local TV stations (KTVU for Fox here in the Bay for instance) having their own little programs and the programs of their franchise mothers. And news are usually (well maybe except for CNN and Fox News) made locally. In most cases this is the only thing that's being produced by the channel's local team. And people here want, or for some reason all the editors think this exclusively what they want: local news.

So a guy in living in the Detroit area will see something totally different then someone living in Northern California. The overlap I believe should not exceed 3-5%.

So you can here about what is happening around you and you can learn about America's wars. That's all of it. For anything else you need to go to bbcnews.com or CNN. (But you won't. On CNN they talk 3 hours long about the same thing looping the same video over and over again. There's not that much news around here.) The content of a typical morning news  show here is about 80% of the time about Oakland. Oakland is probably one of the worst places to live here in the US. (According to Wikipedia: "During the first decade of the 21st century Oakland has consistently been listed as one of the most dangerous large cities in the United States.") So we hear about gang wars, domestic disturbance and so on. The next 15% of the content is a bit more pleasant. I remember seeing on TV the Hungarian national news from the 50's and 60's (repeats! not live :D) was something similar. When they went to next-door-lady/guy and asked his/her opinion about something totally unimportant. Like, in Sunnyvale there're too many mosquitoes, and some citizens are deeply worried about the chemicals city officials are about to deploy to lower their numbers. And in the meantime even a cat stuck on the tree next door... The last 5% is about Iraq or Iran.

Wonder why Americans know so little about the world? Blame their news!

My typical morning news at home was about Budapest, the country, Europe and rest of the world. What Sarkozy said, what Angela Merkel said. If Tony Blair agrees with them and Obama disagrees. Etc.

But here even that's different, because everything needs sugar coating:

It's a sugar coated apple: candy apple