Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday that the United States is losing the global “information war.”
“You’ve got a set of global networks, that Al Jazeera has been the leader in, that are literally changing peoples minds and attitudes,” Clinton said, “and like it or hate it, it is really effective.”
“Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news,” Clinton continued. “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 English live-streamed online video of protests unfolding in Egypt and across the Middle East this year. The rising popularity of the channel, which is not offered by most American cable providers, has led to a concerted campaign by the company to enlist viewers’ assistance in ‘demanding’ it.
Clinton also mentioned the English-language news operations established by Russia and China as evidence that “we are engaged in an information war and we are losing that war.”
