Baltimore Sun: Why Al Jazeera buying Current TV is a good thing for media, country.

[madfloridian]

Why Al Jazeera buying Current TV is a good thing.

A few quotes from the article.

The lack of access to Al Jazeera English on cable TV makes me wonder what kind of sheep we are as media consumers -- and what kind of mice we have as media critics that cable companies can get away with not offering this option even as they they offer a sea of channels devoted to shopping and reruns of lame network shows from previous decades.

Philip Seib, author of "The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics," had a one-word answer when I asked him why the channel is not available in cities like Baltimore: "Politics."

..."El-Nawawy, an associate professor at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, explains the lack of access in part by saying, "The cable carriers are afraid to carry it, because they don't want to alienate their constituents, they don't want to alienate their viewers, they don't want to go out of the box, they want to stay in their comfort zone. They play it safe."

"Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news," Hillary Clinton told a Senate Foreign Affairs panel in 2011. "You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of millions of 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.

I have read the Brighthouse and Time Warner are not going to carry the channel.

It appears that "Comcast, Dish, DirecTV, Verizon and AT&T have agreed to the switch from Current to Al Jazeera America."

Good for them.

Here is a page from their online site. It is called http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/">Inside Story Americas

A few of the articles:

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013/01/20131394414159593.html">Does spying on Americans protect the US?

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013/01/201311135046579796.html">What is behind the fiscal cliff standoff.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/12/201212279357713630.html">Have US police forces become too militarised?