Michael American news broadcasts often report only on local events, and there is plenty of that in San Francisco and the surrounding area. A shooting in front of the nightclub on 16th Street, a roadblock because someone found a box of World War II hand grenades while cleaning out the basement, an exploded gas line that set half a neighborhood on fire -- such reports are commonplace for us. People are only marginally interested in whether a civil war breaks out in Libya or a reactor explodes in Japan, and local news stations report on these events at most briefly.
Reports from Germany, such as the Guttenberg affair, the death of Peter Alexander, or even the results of federal elections, never make it to American television. That's why we watch the German Tagesschau almost daily, which my laptop streams from tagesschau.de on the internet and then displays on the big TV screen in the living room in excellent picture quality. It's a real enrichment for us; without this service, after 15 years of absence, we probably wouldn't be able to name the German Interior Minister or know the amount of the Hartz IV standard rate. Thank you, public broadcasters!
Current update: For owners of a Roku box (Rundbrief 12/2010), the Tagesschau is available under https://owner.roku.com/add/tagesschau, which is a dedicated channel you can sign up for, for free. Then, the latest edition of Tagesschau and several other ARD news programs will be available in the Roku channel menu.