Europe and the US - Odd Ducks

BBC is currently running a poll on "Who do you trust?", in regards to who the public trusts the most to have the best intentions for society. This sort of random data is usually useless but entertaining, and sometimes insightful. After filling out their quiz, I sent in my region, language, etc, and got to look at the final breakdowns of votes split in a variety of ways.

21% of those who selected "Showbiz Personalities" as being the most trustworthy were from North America (second only to North Africa), while Europeans were bottom of the list at 9%. I do see a bit of this in the media over here, where articles regularly blast Bono's crusading for the poor as good for nothing but glorifying Bono. Because he loves it so much, I'll type his name again. Bono.

Moving on...

A little surprise was that marginally more Europeans (10%) trusted business leaders to have the community's best interests at heart than did North Americans (9%). Likely because Americans have been living longer with the results of trusting business leaders to have the community's best interests in heart.

They're about even on religious leaders, with Americans trusting them a bit more, and on their opinions of the national media - again, with Americans trusting it more. The biggest difference (and one which I see every day here) is in their trust of the national government to safeguard the people's interests - Europeans are second from top with 37% of the vote, and Americans are second from the bottom at 21%... trusting our government only marginally better than North Africans at the bottom of the list. I think this is a big part of my astonishment at the thinking of people here that the government should fix everything - if there are no jobs, the government should make jobs, it should provide education, six weeks of vacation per year, etc. Of course, we actually have good encounters with government concepts here, like our state health care, as opposed to in the US, where one's encounters with government are nearly entirely negative (giving you tickets, restricting your rights, passing laws allowing megacorporations to dump toxic waste in your backyard, and so forth). It's really no wonder that so many Americans are just a few MRE's from the survivalist mentality.

Lest the Europeans start to feel superior, however, there is this amusing fact - three times as many Europeans (17%) think TV news is trustworthy compared to North Americans (6%). Of course, they have BBC and we have Bill O'Reilly..... maybe there's reason for this...