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Can you hear me now?

“Like it or hate it, it is really effective. In fact, viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it is real news. . . . 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 that is not providing information to us, let alone foreigners.”

—Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State,
“Hillary Clinton’s Al Jazeera Comments Draw Attention of U.S. Media,”
HuffPost 3/7/2010

• Editorial Comment: What intrigues me about this is that Clinton’s observation “draws attention of U.S. media.” How can anything that’s not Charlie Sheen or the weather interest U.S. media?

A decade ago, a former student/National Guard sergeant returning from a tour in Iraq told me and students at Utah State University that he and his fellow soldiers sought out Al Jazeera “in-country,” because the U.S. media were so bad. Today, the best we can hope for from U.S. global media is some guy's cellphone. In the “information age,” we are deaf, dumb and blind. On a good day.

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