Praise indeed for Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera may have its critics especially across the Atlantic but Robert Kaplan isn't one of them.

Writing in the October edition of Atlantic magazine he describes it as

a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it.adding that

if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously.