MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

The US Secretary of State recommends Al Jazeera if you want “real news”

Hillary Clinton claims US media is not particularly informative and with millions of commercials

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the US 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. One of the reasons she cited for this was the quality of channels like Al Jazeera.

“Viewer-ship 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”

Al Jazeera, based in Qatar and broadcast in Arabic, is carried throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Al Jazeera English is the sister network which mirrors most of the Arabic programming.

British journalist Alexander Cockburn put it this way on “The Week” website.

“Millions of Arabs can’t tweet. Facebook is unfamiliar to them. But they all watch TV, which means they all watch Al Jazeera. In comparison to the significance of Al Jazeera in motivating Arabs to rush to the main square in town and demonstrate, Twitter and Facebook are as two ticks on the rump of a water buffalo”.

Al Jazeera English has long been waging an information war in the US media to highlight its worthiness, as witnessed by numerous friendly stories about their key role in the Arab world in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly.