All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Sick of Paris Hilton? Don’t particularly care about Anna Nicole Smith’s baby’s daddy? If you're a cable news consumers and are hunting for information from around the planet, your options are limited.

And while there is much hand-wringing over how information and news from the west can be distributed in the Middle East, we tend to think less about how the news from the rest of the world is being passed along to us here in the states.

There are obvious reasons why a cable company would be reticent to broadcast a foreign-based outlet, beginning with the language barrier. If you’re a cable provider, why do you want to cater to a very narrow Francophone niche? Or Farsi? But one channel – that magnet of Middle Eastern media controversies, Al Jazeera – has taken its programming to the English-speaking audience with a network that’s about a half-year old. And it has succeeded in convincing one of America’s top TV watchers – Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star – of its importance and value in the media landscape:

I’ve been monitoring the new channel for several months over the Internet, paying $6 a month to watch a video stream supplied by Real Networks. And I am convinced it is the most important English-language cable channel to come along since Fox News.

It’s everything our cable news isn’t: global, meaty, consequential and compelling in the best sense of the word. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

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