ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the majority of French television coverage was remarkably free of overt and even covert forms of anti-American bias. l'Amerique Profonde the term which served as the banner for the geographical insight was l'Amerique profonde, a term that translates literally as "deep America," connoting rurality and remoteness. Geographical television content most often took the form of video portraits of places and their political cultures drawn from across the United States. Television's contextualization of the election encouraged French viewers to excuse Americans for their support of George W Bush in light of their peculiar environments. The association of religious fundamentalism with the President's position was intriguing to the French because it recalled long-standing critiques such as Talleyrand's joke about "different religions and a single meal" yet it presented a paradox because of the link between secularism and democracy in French political imaginary.
