I suspect Sean might get more unbiased news about the US there in Vienna than we get here. I haven't lived in Vienna, but I lived in Germany for two years and I was impressed with the erudite, straightforward reporting in the papers. From what I could gather, many of the papers there are written for a better-educated audience than ours. The Frankfurter Allgemeine, for example, is a pretty hard-core newspaper, not an easy read.
Also, perspective. All of us except Sean live surrounded by the noisy racket of American culture. We are bombarded with messages that are shaped to conform to American biases and preconceptions. This helps us forget that our high-consumption lifestyle is nearly unique in the world. Living in a nearly perpetual war economy has become commonplace to us, and our culture and our media treat it as a given. We truly live in a cultural bubble.
If you really want to see us as the world sees us, you have to live overseas for awhile. My wake-up call happened in London, where some locals (even those who liked the U.S.) told me that they fear the U.S. more than any other country because we seem bent on militarism and the use of force, which they think could lead to another global war or a nuclear launch. They also fear our ability to change the climate so that the gulf stream (which makes English weather like Oregon's, despite England's high latitude) disappears and English weather becomes "rather Alaskan" as one fellow put it.
