Hillary Clinton’s Al Jazeera Comments Draw Attention Of U.S. Media

As usual, she’s right…

I’ve been occasionally watching Al-Jazeera English on line and it reminds me of how CNN and the BBC used to be…

U.S. News reporting has become a joke-mainly due to the Corporate acquisition of the networks and the mixing of real news with entertainment.

Not to mention “opinion” journalism where talking heads scream at each other…

And networks like Faux News that just reiterate the Republican Party talking points all day….

Sad when you have to watch a foreign network to get around censorship in the US.  Censorship that is driven by profit motives….

NEW YORK — A decade ago the U.S. government attacked Al-Jazeera as a propagator of anti-American propaganda. Now Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is citing the network for fine news coverage – and tweaking the U.S. media in the process.

The Arab broadcaster says it’s ready to take advantage of what it considers a major boost in its acceptance in the United States.

Clinton, on the week many U.S. television outlets were preoccupied by the spectacle of actor Charlie Sheen, suggested during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that American networks were falling behind in the competition for information.

Al-Jazeera has been a leader in changing people’s minds and attitudes, Clinton told lawmakers Wednesday.

“Like it or hate it, it is really effective,” Clinton said. “In fact, viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it is real news.”

“You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news that is not providing information to us, let alone foreigners.”

In fact, Al-Jazeera’s television viewership hasn’t gone up much in the U.S. because it is still not widely available, seen only on scattered cable systems in Vermont, Ohio and Washington, D.C.

But online viewership of Al-Jazeera English spiked during the demonstrations in Egypt – up 2,500 percent at its peak, with nearly half of the followers from the United States, the network said.

Al-Jazeera has taken advantage of the moment, asking visitors to its website to click a tab that automatically generates a letter to the users’ local cable system encouraging them to add the network. More than 40,000 e-mails have been generated, spokeswoman Molly Conroy said.

via Hillary Clinton’s Al Jazeera Comments Draw Attention Of U.S. Media.