In the age of HuffPost, Talking Points Memo, Red State, Powerline, DailyKos, Foreign Policy (2.0), Daily Beast, Frum Forum and so on — it’s easy to forget that there are fantastic resource pages out there on what is happening around the world. Al Jazeera is blasting by much of its competition in the US and UK in its penetrating coverage of the revolutions underway in the Middle East.
But PBS NewsHour is getting sexy again — OK, maybe an overstatement, but I think it is really getting hip. I like the new PBS Online NewsHour World page.
In general, the resource pages for the NewsHour are superb. And Margaret Warner is tenacious at getting her targets lined up for interviews. I was with her in the galleries as a guest of Susan Rice at the UN Security Council meeting chaired by President Obama a year and a half ago and realized it was far better helping Margaret Warner get what she wanted rather than be someone in her way.
And I owe Jim Lehrer a lot for doing a “double take” when I mentioned during an interview with him that the US was spending more than $100 billion a year in Afghanistan which only had a GDP of $14 billion. His own astonishment at that figure, expressed on air, got hundreds of thousands of other Americans scratching their heads and considering whether the cost of America’s neo-colonial experiment in Afghanistan was worth it.
But on the new World Page there is a lot of neat stuff — including a Twitter list that includes @SCClemons, @globalvoices, @thedailybeast, @nytimesworld, @pjcrowley, @wsjworldnews, @globalpost, @nprnews, and @pritheworld. Good starting roster — even with a bit of self-interested bias.
Onward and upward, and thanks to the NewsHour team for upping its game.
— Steve Clemons
