You don't often hear American politicians say something that's, you know, true, but Hillary Clinton did today.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers "real news" -- something she said American media were falling far short of doing.Now could someone please erase all our news stations and start over? It's easy: news, not tripe. Is that such a difficult formula to achieve? I sure wish I could get Al Jazeera on my teevee. But of course, I can't because that would allow real news to reach an American. Me.
Clinton was speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and she said the U.S. is losing the "information war" in the world. One of the reasons she cited for this was the quality of channels like Al Jazeera.
"Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news," she said. "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 which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."
3 comments:
You can get Al Jazeera on the net at http://english.aljazeera.net/
Funny when I was in Germany visiting friends not long after the Tienanmen Square incident, we had a big discussion in the local pub one evening about US News - even then I labeled it entertainment and not news.
Foreigners laugh at our news. They say,"Is THAT what you watch in this country?!" But no one here seems to care that there's no real news. Apparently, American think wall-to-wall nonsense is an acceptable substitute for actual news. It's bizarre that people don't demand better. And thanks for the ink!
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