Hillary Clinton: "Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers "real news" --

[JanDutchy]

Source: Guardian

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on 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.

Clinton was speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and she said the U.S. is losing the "information war" in the world. Other countries and global news outlets, she said, were making inroads into places like the Middle East more effectively than the United States has. One of the reasons she cited for this was the quality of channels like Al Jazeera. The channel, she said, was "changing peoples' minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective." U.S. news, she added, was not keeping up.

"Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news," Clinton 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."


Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2011/mar/07/usa-hillaryclinton

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Amazing, that people in USA allows this:

Freedom of speeche includes to my opinion: freedom to chose not led by profit-searche of broadcasting companies.

[JDPriestly]

1. Hillary Clinton is so right about this. I hope that she understands that

the support for Wikileaks such as it is also is motivated by the fact that our news media does not give us the information that it should.

Another instance in which our capitalism is failing us. Our news media have consolidated to the point that they can safely just repeat the AP stories and be done with reporting.

I wish that Bill Clinton had not signed the media consolidation bill. Hillary should let Bill know just what damage he did when he signed that bill.

[JanDutchy]

2. Cann't you make a referendum?

"The time is ripe: eat the apple."

[Javaman]

3. In a side comment not picked up by reporters...

"we will allow Al Jazeera to report real news until they start pointing our our own hipocracy...that's off the record".

[snot]

4. Here's the video of Clinton's comments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zW4AKrOIak

[Lastactiongyro]

5. You can get more indepth reporting of Clinton's statement here:

http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/