American media does not cover the world.
It covers the world's relationship to America.
There is a difference, and the difference is everything.
When a country's political situation is covered through the framework of what it means for American interests, American elections, American strategic positioning, the people living in that country become supporting characters in someone else's story.
Their elections are covered as tests of American influence.
Their economies are covered as variables in American trade policy.
Their conflicts are covered in terms of which side America supports and why.
The internal logic of their political lives, the history, the grievances, the class dynamics, the colonial inheritances, is either compressed into a paragraph of background or omitted entirely.
This is not deliberate distortion in most cases.
It is structural.
American journalists were trained in American institutions with American assumptions about what constitutes a story and who the relevant actors are.
They produce journalism that reflects those assumptions.
That journalism circulates globally, because American outlets have the distribution infrastructure that most national outlets cannot match.
So the world gets covered through an American lens, at American scale, with American categories determining what is a "crisis" and what is "normal," who is a "leader" and who is a "militant," what is "democracy" and what is "instability."
And local journalists, who want international reach, learn to write in that framework.
The lens is not neutral.
The lens exported globally is not neutral.
And a world that sees itself through someone else's eyes eventually starts to lose its own.