Its a vicious cycle, if you report something bad about someone or something, then you establish an impression, then the easier it is to reinforce that impression with lesser bad things, or incorrect bad things, or mis iterperuted bad things. Then everything snowballs! There is no chance to defend your name against the torrid of accusations regardless of them being founded or unfounded.

This is really easy with a media that prefers bad news. Case in point is korea. Once have I seen anything good reported about the US. That was when a group of marines visited an orphanage during christmas time.

My unit does this every year. Plus we weekly send soldiers to teach english to children at the local elementary schools. When Monsoon season comes, we go out in force and help sandbag bridges over the han river. We even help farmers during the harvest season.

But thanks to the media here, most don't know that. Many people honestly thought that when two girls were run over one and a half years ago, that the driver intentionally did it. Why? I don't know, "he was just an evil american". Others would go on rants about murders that never happened, or with incorrect facts, get mad when US personnel accused of crimes were released by korean courts, because, they just knew they were guilty because they were americans. One time a korean friend was angry at the US because she simply misread a story in an english language newspaper and thought the US was getting more land for Yongsan Army Garrison.

I regulary encounter racism here, (headline! white guy faces racism!) even amoung some people who are my friends, though they don't realize it. Outside of that I regularly encounter sheer suprise and shock when they see a white person, let alone a "US army soldier who probably could not graduate diaper school" speak korean. . . .

This is the image we face not because we earned it, but because the media wants a story, and thought they hide behind a facade of "good news is not really news, so we don't report it argument" thier job is to represent facts accurately, not character assassination.