U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has surprised many after she praised the news programming on Al Jazeera, while she criticized the over-commercialization of news programs in the United States. Speaking before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton said the United States is losing the “information war.”

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.”

While Al Jazeera English is broadcast to more than 200 million homes around the world, it is hardly available in the United States due to what critics have described as a media blackout by U.S. cable and satellite providers.