Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Wednesday, she[Hillary Clinton] said the Arabic news network Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers "real news" and is far more effective both in the U.S. and abroad.
SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: 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....
AMY GOODMAN: To discuss the cuts in public broadcasting and Hillary Clinton’s calls for funding of state media to be broadcast abroad, we’re joined by Robert McChesney in Madison. Bob McChesney is the author of several books on media and politics. His most recent is The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. Professor McChesney is also co-founder of Free Press, a national media reform organization.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Bob McChesney. Talk about Hillary Clinton’s statements before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, I think Hillary Clinton, over the past decade, has been probably one of the most perceptive critics of American news media, going back to her work on the effect of advertising to children and the effect of commercialism on children in the first part of the decade. And this is another example of it. I think she understands the asininity of American corporate television news, how uninformed and misinformed it leaves the American people and how worthless it is, in the final analysis. And probably going abroad and seeing the problems of U.S. foreign policy and looking at Al Jazeera and other media and seeing what the people of the world are responding to only underlines the importance of this media critique she’s developing.
AMY GOODMAN: But Bob, if you could talk about her analysis, the description is Al Jazeera is offering real news; what the U.S. media is offering is not. But the prescription to pour millions into, well, state media broadcasting abroad?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: No, that’s bogus. That’s the wrong solution to a proper prescription. You know, currently the United States spends roughly twice as much money bankrolling international broadcasting—Voice of America and the various Radio Martís and things like that—than it does paying for domestic public broadcasting and community broadcasting, roughly twice as much—$750 million, roughly, last year. And the idea of raising that and putting more propaganda out to sort of enhance the view of the United States vis-à-vis other nations of the world is entirely the wrong way to go....
[Hillary Clinton testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.]
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Bob McChesney, ... can you talk about the distinction between state media, like Voice of America, and public broadcasting?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, yeah. The United States has had a strange relationship to publicly funded broadcasting historically. We spent much more, huge amounts of money, since 1945 to subsidize Voice of America, which is an English-language and actually multiple-language service around the world. And I think Hillary Clinton is right: it was, by the standards of American journalism, at the high end of broadcast journalism for much of the Cold War period. But it was not permitted to be broadcast in the United States. So we’re—the United States taxpayers were funding a world-class public broadcasting system, but they weren’t allowed to hear it. We were forced to listen to the commercial guys and a much less-well-funded public broadcasting system that emerged in the late 1960s. And, you know, this has always been a contradiction, a conflict of America, that—and we thought we don’t subsidize journalism, but we do. And the tension plays out right now because around the world people have access to quality information. And Hillary Clinton, I think, is accurate, that Al Jazeera is a very credible news source that is far more relevant to the people of the world, including this country oftentimes, than what passes for journalism either in our Voice of America but especially in our corporate news media.
And the way out of this, though, I think, as I’ve said before, is that we need to really have a huge subsidy for competing community and public broadcasting in the United States and then make that available to the world, show the world our best journalism, a journalism that is as critical of the United States government as it is of other governments, that has one standard of evidence, one standard of judgment, not a double standard. Nothing could be a more powerful statement to the people of the world that we’re committed to democracy than approaching it in that manner, rather than saying we have one message for the domestic audience, and we have another message for the world, and never the twain shall meet.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Smith-Mundt Act after World War II, Bob McChesney, that addressed the issue of propaganda, the difference between public media at home and Voice of America, and explicitly state propaganda abroad. I mean, isn’t it true the [Smith]-Mundt Act made it illegal for the Voice of America to be broadcast at home, because it was considered propaganda?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Yeah, and the main reason for that was that conservatives and some liberals feared the idea of having government broadcasting propaganda to the Americans. They had no qualms about government broadcasting propaganda abroad.:O But there was also a commercial factor. The big commercial networks in this country wanted a monopoly over Americans’ minds, and they didn’t want the American people to see what Europeans were able to see, which is that if you had a well-funded public service, the commercial guys really weren’t that necessary.
