In America, roughly half the people think that President Donald Trump is a vicious wolf, and the other half see him as a sheepdog. He may look like a wolf, but he is using his claws and fangs to protect the innocent lambs, not to eat them like his cousins on the left.

However, if you look at the rest of the world, a much larger portion of people believe in the “Orange Man Bad” meme touted by the left. Why? It’s a perception created almost entirely by the American mainstream media – with the notable exception of Fox News.

Somehow only the far-left fake news about Trump and the U.S. makes it into foreign media. The positive or even neutral news about the president stays behind for a largely conservative audience in America.

Step One: Slander Fox News

This framing by international media is far more innocent than you may instinctively think. It’s a two-step process that started with the demonization of Fox News by Hollywood and the left-wing media.

The average foreign journalist – and therefore the average foreign news reader – believes that Fox News is a far-right nut-wing conspiracy channel that promotes only ideological propaganda, while CNN and MSNBC are neutral arbiters of truth.

In the real world, Fox News is the only mainstream media channel that is somewhat fair and balanced in their coverage. Whenever they are politically slanted, such as on Tucker Carlson and Hannity, it is clearly and unambiguously presented as biased punditry. In the fake news legacy media, however, there is no separation between fact and opinion. Propaganda is portrayed as neutral information.

But even the punditry on Fox is less biased and more balanced than the so-called neutral news on MSNBC and CNN. Carlson, for instance, invites mostly guests he strongly disagrees with. He often ridicules them and argues harshly against their position, but at least they get to present their views.

On the other channels, finding articulate opposition to the leftist narrative is rare. It’s essentially an echo chamber.

Step Two: Far-left = Neutral

Due to the highly successful slandering campaign against the right by a progressive media, foreign outlets fail to realize that they are aping highly biased political propaganda as news. You can certainly blame them for being uncritical and naïve, but their error is largely innocent. Given their left-wing outlook, they have no reason to doubt that what comes out of America is an objective presentation of facts and truth.

Consequently, by the time a story reaches ordinary people across the globe, it is essentially a cartoon version of reality. In the case of Trump, the bias is extreme, but it is true of how the U.S. is presented abroad in general.

Slandering America

Sometimes you hear people in the legacy media complain that Trump is making a fool of America. However, the perpetrators are the media who deliberately do everything they can to slander and ridicule their president. The U.S. has a free press, and they, therefore, have the right to write whatever they want, but make no mistake about it: The primary source of America’s declining reputation abroad is the far-left media.