Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had some kind words to say about Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera, which has been at the forefront of covering the protests in the Middle East:
"Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news," Clinton said. "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."
It's worth remembering how the Bush administration characterized the network at the height of the "Freedom Agenda," with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accusing them of airing videos of beheadings (false) and of being responsible for the terrorism because of their coverage of Iraq:
"We are being hurt by al-Jazeera in the Arab world," he said. "There is no question about it. The quality of the journalism is outrageous - inexcusably biased - and there is nothing you can do about it except try to counteract it." He said it was turning Arabs against the United States.
"You could say it causes the loss of life," he added. "It's causing Iraqi people to be killed" by enflaming anti-American passions and encouraging attacks against Iraqis who assist the Americans, he added.
Rumsfeld's remarks were characteristic of the Bush administration's inability to admit its mistakes. Al-Jazeera wasn't hurting the U.S. in the Arab world; the Bush administration's own decisions were hurting the U.S. in the Arab world. But this was the very definition of the "Freedom Agenda": Freedom is great, but only on Bush's terms.
Still, the transition of Al-Jazeera from terrorist mouthpiece to freedom's midwife is pretty remarkable, and all the more so because I'm not sure the network itself has really changed that much.
