But now: US viewers seek Al Jazeera coverage

Al Jazeera is producing some of the finest global news coverage in the world today. I became a regular viewer recently so I could keep up on political debates with my family based in South Africa who have AJ on satellite.<p>Watching AJ reminds me how human-interest and emotion-centric the local news has become. The Egyptian coverage on CNN is nauseating. Yesterday a caller phoned in from Cairo and was falling over his words just spilling massive amounts of useful data and the anchor woman interrupts him to ask him about his feelings.

As the vast majority of news networks have been scaling back "expensive" forms of journalism like having dedicated foreign bureaus, Al Jazeera has been one of the precious few news agencies that has been rapidly expanding it's foreign bureaus. The move is really starting to pay off for them.<p>In an increasingly globalized economy where we need much better coverage of international events, US news networks are going to find themselves scooped and out reported by Al Jazeera again and again. It's an impressive news agency, and to think, we bombed their offices twice in the last 10 years by accident[1].<p>ref:<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War#Attack_on_Al_Jazeera" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War#...</a>

Anyone wanting greater understanding of the regional dynamics in the Middle East should read al Jazeera regularly, just like anyone wanting to really understand local politics should read their local newspaper for a year, instead of reading an NYTimes article about their local politics. Watching it when there is a crisis really doesn't help understand, it just helps give you more information.<p>Similar to how a pipe fitter in West Texas reading HN once a month wouldn't really help them understand the culture that exists in the Y!Combinator/startup world, watching AJ when there is a crisis without watching it regularly leads you to impose your own cultural lens on the issues. I lived in a Central Asian country for three years, and it took me about two years to really understand how much I didn't understand the local culture.

Does anyone know if cable carriers in the US don't carry AJ because of lack of demand or is there documented evidence of active exclusion for business or political reasons?<p>Please don't take this question as conspiracy theory flame bait. I'm just curious about what is known about this.

Even if All Jazeera is seeing a huge traffic spike, it's still only a small percentage of Americans who are trying to seek out real news. The vast majority of Americans don't even want an uncensored media.

Hm, it strikes me that there are absolutely zero advertisements of any kind on that page.

Maybe Al Jazeera should just run with being a 21st century, Internet delivered news channel.<p>I mean, I don't get Al Jazeera on my TV because I don't have cable or satellite anyway. I do have Netflix, etc, though.

I am not watching Al Jazeera because of their underlying ideology, but because they are doing the best reporting on Egypt. If they were to continue to provide such powerful reporting on other topics I would watch them for that as well.

I'd like to get Al Jazeera on ivi.tv