Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Clinton said Washington is losing the "information war" in the world. She cited the quality of news channels like the Doha-based Al-Jazeera as one of the reasons justifying her opinion, The Huffington Post reported on Thursday.
"We're the most technologically advanced country in the world, so slowly but surely we've been trying to take back the airwaves in Afghanistan against Taliban with the most primitive kind of communication equipment. Now, take that as one example where I don't think we were very competitive, and we have worked like crazy to change that, and then go to the most extreme where you've got a global, a set of global networks, that al-Jazeera has been the leader in, that are literally changing people's minds and attitudes," she said.
Clinton also compared Al-Jazeera with US media outlets, and pointed out that the network is becoming increasingly popular in the United States because it disseminates "real news."
"And like it or hate it, it (Al-Jazeera) is really effective. And in fact viewership of al-Jazeera is going up in the US because it's 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 which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."
Clinton's remarks reflect the faulty coverage of the latest developments in the Afghan war in US media.
According to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the war in Afghanistan accounted for just four percent of news coverage in major US outlets in early December 2010.
Source: MP/HGH/MMN
REPORTS!