>Did anyone else see this? It was very enlightening and interesting...
>
>http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_anti-americans.html
[...]
>I guess the media everywhere controls world perception!

I guess your governments have shown too much ignorance in regard of this. Their own PR has been meager. The opinion of the own citizens was their primary concern. Of course, your president and ministers do visit and do invite other countries and have official talks and small talks there. And of course, they regularly accept invitations by journalists from abroad. And probably yes, they talk more freely about certain matters than many of their colleagues abroad. But nevertheless, they are regularly ignorant also. This may be because they know that they are the BIG, RICH, SUCCESSFUL country and the other countries are smaller, poorer and/or failing. They somehow presume that they are therefore automatically a GOOD EXAMPLE to those others and that this needs not to be proven time and again, in deeds and words.

I think it would help if the US president and ministers would ALWAYS TRY TO EXPLAIN whenever asked for an explanation. If the basic attitude is morally defendable and the explanation is in clear words, then the explanation may silence most of those who criticize, or at least let them speak out their criticism less loud.

(BTW, this principle can be applied to the US government, but also to other countries, to companies and to individuals. A clear case of a company is MS. My personal opinion about MS is no longer positive, simply because they haven't tried hard enough to explain (insiders know what I'm referring to), thus showing ignorance. No new debate please. This was only to demonstrate how unwillingness to thoroughly explain can cause people to develop a negative perception.)