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Originally Posted by Dragonlich
If the US president gets elected, we have day-long election specials here (including all the minor election problems); if the French president gets elected, we get a small news item about the final outcome. If the US president says something stupid, we hear about it; if the German prime-minister does the same, we don't. If US police officers or soldiers abuse prisoners, we hear about it for weeks on end; if Spanish, Iranian or Indonesian officials do the same, nobody will know.
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I don't know if Dutch press fundamentally differs from the press of my homeland, but at least the newspapers I read usually tend to cover politics far better than just giving a small news item about French presidential elections, but I get your point - however, there is a simple reason why US elections get more publicity than many other countries and that is because USA as a superpower tends to make people interested about it's politics. A good example of this would be that local press where I live don't do huge articles about governor election in for example New Mexico, but California was still on the spotlight. This isn't really bias, it's just the way press operates - it tells people about stuff people want to read about. It's kinda crap if you are interested about the intriguing internal politics of Bangladesh, but rather understandable as you cannot print newspapers 1000 pages thick.
And about for example prisoner abuses, it'd be rather tedious if all human rights abuses of for example Iran and Indonesia would be reported on daily basis - I suppose that everyone already knows that those countries tend to use torture systematically. Maybe US should also start torturing on a daily basis, too?
There seems to be a belief on this thread that a right to hate/not-hate (I think even this entire concept of hate is debatable) is a scale of some sort where the good things are heaped on the plus-side and bad things on the minus-side. This kind of "empirical method" of measuring whether the country is "good" or "bad" and whether people who "oppose/hate/criticize" it are wrong sounds somewhat flawed to me.