I think all the majority of Americans know about Al Jazeera is how it was disdained for showing videos of Al Qaeda in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. However, having seen the 2004 documentary Control Room, I have a more nuanced view. During the lead up to Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was the Bush administration and a compliant U.S. media who were guilty of the propaganda (especially Fox News [sic] and rechtsdreck radio, but extending throughout the mainstream media including The New York Times). This while Al Jazeera offered brave, on-the-scene reporting of what was actually happening in Iraq. By the wake of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, in March 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had this to say about Al Jazeera:
Ms. Clinton said this because she feared the U.S. was losing the worldwide "information war." Indeed, not only is the U.S. losing due to a woefully underfunded PBS and NPR, even Britain's BBC has had budget cuts and has let go some of their talented reporters who have since been hired by Al Jazeera."Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States 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."
In my opinion, the best thing one can do for news in the U.S. is to subscribe to the New York Times and to read other national and local newspapers. Two key newspapers to avoid, however, are the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and the Moonie-owned Washington Times, both of which get cited on C-Span's Washington Journal (a decent, but highly-overrated source of news) as if they were not the mere Republican-1% propaganda that they are. One must also always keep in mind that most newspapers aren't liberal. Britain's Guardian and Wisconsin's Madison Times being the only liberal ones I've encountered. The fact is that most newspapers more often than not endorse the Republican candidate for president. Most of those who throw around the phrase "liberal media" do so only because they want to dismiss facts inconsistent to their world view.
If one supplements newspapers with NPR, PBS, the BBC, Harper's magazine, MSNBC's All In w/Chris Hayes [updated 4/14/13] and Moyers & Co., and some business news such as Bloomberg, The Financial Times, and The Economist, one will get about as informed as they can be in the United States (if I do say so myself).
But most of those who do watch news squander too much time on cable. This is especially appealing to liberals who can find the nearly-mythical liberal media some times on MSNBC, and up until yesterday, on Current TV. But now that Current TV has been eliminated, and given the fact that MSNBC shows Morning Joe weekday mornings, TV's liberal media has been reduced by over 50% since January 2, 2013. The biggest reason I will miss Current TV is because its truly liberal bias contrasted so well with CBS, NBC, and ABC News who are only labelled "liberal," once again, by those who hate having their worldviews contradicted by facts.
Footnote: Those watching the misnamed Fox News [sic] are not getting news at all, but a 24/7/365 commercial for the Republican Party that would honestly be called "GOP-TV."
