THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are among the millions of Americans turning to Al-Jazeera English.Walking back from the White House this week, Abderrahim Foukara, Washington bureau chief for Al-Jazeera television, could have been forgiven for pinching himself. He’d just met senior aides to President Barack Obama who had lavished praise on the Arab television network.
“They told us that during Egypt basically Al-Jazeera English was all they watched to try to make sense of what was going on,” he said, taking off his overcoat in the channel’s bureau on K Street, the boulevard that houses the city’s top lobbyists. The President, they made clear, had been one of those glued to the screen.
On Capitol Hill four weeks ago, Hillary Clinton, the United States Secretary of State, delivered what amounted to an advertisement for Al-Jazeera to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “Viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news,” she 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.”
In London, where Moroccan-born Foukara worked for the BBC World Service for nearly a decade before moving to the US in 2001, David Cameron has also made clear he is a fan. The Prime Minister has told friends that he considers Al-Jazeera to be essential viewing, the only network that gives the texture of what the Arab Street is thinking. » | Toby Harnden | Saturday, April 09, 2011
