Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Al Jezeera is Winning

This morning Hillary Clinton spoke to the US Foreign Policy Priorities Committee on CSPAN. She said that Al Jezeera is winning the war of information over American broadcastors. She is quoted as saying that "Our private media cannot fill that gap. Our private media, particularly cultural programming often works at counter purposes to what we truly are as Americans. I remember having an Afghan general tell me that the only thing he thought about Americans is that all the men wrestled and the women walked around in bikinis because the only TV he ever saw was Baywatch and World Wide Wrestling."


She seems to hint here that since commercial media is driven by profit, there is not enough incentive to pursue the better and more full news story. An idea that came to me is that perhaps there does need to be some state-run news group. It could be semi-independent, as in the case of the new york federal reserve, where the government cannot simply dictate it's operation. If a news group can be freed of profit incentives and commercial interests, maybe we can get closer to a kind of objective journalism. On the other side, it is of course dangerous to give government any level of control over the media, then again, are commercial interests any better?

What do you guys think?

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-al-jazeera-2011-3#ixzz1FUusWuxJ

At the end of the article it mentions that "Clinton says she is leading an effort to spread U.S. propaganda through new media, with twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi."  Which is also interesting...talk later on this

2 comments:

  1. Commercial interests are definitly not better, just the lesser of two evils. Government control of the media, no matter how limited, would drive away too many viewers and provide our enemies with another criticism of our country and government. Perhaps a better reason why it wouldn't work is that journalists would likely be paid less and therefore less inclined to pursue a career in that field.

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  2. what does that mean that al jazeera is winning? american broadcasting networks are carrying just as much news. al jazeera has an advantage for arab world protests: they are local, and get their first. but i for one do not see them as winning. and her proof is bad, maybe that iragi general only had one channel. there is no way he actually flipped through the channels. we are all at this point well aware that there are 24 hr news channels.

    but it may be advantageous to carry a channel that is free of commercial interests. if thats possible. but being that everything is a business it seems that it is unlikely.

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