Cross-cultural living -- having a footing on both American culture and European culture -- can offer some interesting and surprising perspectives on world events.  The news coverage of the recent hearings on Capitol Hill, with General David Petraeus (the top U.S. commander in Iraq) and Ryan Crocker (the U.S. ambassador to Iraq) reporting the situation in Iraq to the houses of Congress, is a prime case in point...

I read the Dutch newspaper first this morning (the NRC Next's cover article, to be specific).  According to this news source, the results of the hearings have been unexpectedly positive.  The general tone of the article was incredibly optimistic (especially considering that European media have been critical of the American policy in Iraq since the first day of airstrikes against Baghdad).  The article basically insinuated that Petraeus was the one true voice that could be trusted on the relative "success" of the Iraq campaigns, and that Americans were generally united in their respect of his integrity in reporting from the front-lines.  By the time I was finished reading the NRC Next article, I got the feeling that a corner had somehow been turned... that maybe these Americans weren't so stupid after all... that maybe something good could come out of the American intervention in Iraq.

Then, within the same hour, I read an American newspaper's take on the same events (the USA Today's on-line edition, to be specific -- which, at the time, placed the story as a third-tier headline, beneath the news of September 11th memorials and football scores).  And acrroding to this news source, the results of the hearings were overwhelmingly negative.  The tone of the article suggested that Washington was more gridlocked than ever on American war policy and that the proceedings on Capitol Hill had been more or less a "dog and pony show" (I believe that was an exact quote from one of the articles that I read this morning, though I cannot now find the same article on-line).  By the time I finished reading the USA Today article, I got the feeling that things were as much -- if not more -- of a quagmire than ever before, and that hope was nowhere in sight.

To say the least, they were very different perspectives.

What's most unusual, though, is that I would have expected the treatment of the story and the attitude of these news sources to be completely reversed.  I always expect the criticism of the Iraq war to be twice as harsh, coming from European news sources; and I expect that coverage from an American news source (particularly the more populist press, i.e. the USA Today) is at least tentatively optimistic... Furthermore, I would normally expect to find the story on the fourth or fifth page -- the International News section -- of the Dutch papers; and I would think that American papers would make the bigger headlines about the hearings.

I honestly don't know which news source captured the story most accurately (since I didn't watch through the hearings themselves, though they were aired live on television here).  I don't even know how possible it is to "accurately" capture such a story as testimony before a divided Congress.  I understand that perspectives on the war in Iraq are greatly varied -- both in the United States of America and around the world -- but I don't understand exactly how or why these various opinions proliferate in the ways they do.

Interesting stuff...