Mali and Burkina Faso banned Americans a few days ago. What with Maduro's kidnapping, it looks like that decision payed off in more ways than they might have anticipated!
It's good to distrust, but ultimately we need to develop media literacy and dive into the media to find out what's actually going on. A lot of news is either minimizing or exaggerating real events, so there is usually some truth (though not always, like I think with the NYT bit here).