I don't think it will surprise you to hear that in my offline discussions with people around here in Belgium, I'm usually the one stepping up to defend the US and pointing out that Americans are pretty awesome people generally. Natural enough for a European who spent a lot of his formative years debating politics in English on a website dominated by Americans and to a lesser extent Brits. I quite agree with you on the 'TV and their week in Orlando' thing.

That said, it's a simple fact that the average European, biased though he may be, knows far more about the US than the average American knows about any particular European country. That's not a criticism, it's a very logical consequence of the power balance, the respective populations of the countries involved, and the natural tendency of smaller countries to be more internationally focused than large ones (which also holds true on a smaller scale within Europe). And yeah, that also means that their opinions, on average, are more supported by facts, and hence deserve to be taken more seriously, even if they are just as biased. The price of being a superpower.

Obviously if you look at individuals it's different, there's plenty of people including many at this site for whom that wouldn't be the case.

I'm sure they wouldn't welcome that, no. But the thing with being a superpower is that often your 'internal' affairs have enough international repercussions that they're not really internal anymore. And it does depend on the topic - Europe's interest in, say, education policy in the US, is pretty limited, until the moment when things escalate to the point that the balance of American politics is affected and international policy changes accordingly.