Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put on her media criticism cap yesterday, praising coverage of the Middle East from Al Jazeera, while saying that the U.S. was losing the “information war” abroad.
“In fact 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.”
Clinton was contrasting the current state of affairs to how the U.S. handled propaganda abroad during the Cold War, with the influential broadcasts of Voice of America, among other outlets.