Friday, March 4, 2011

Hillary Clinton says what we watch is not news

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.

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."
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.