know thine enemy’s propaganda

[update: I added a missing link]

Roger Cohen, a NYT reporter and columnist who has spent most of his career abroad, brings home a message: in 2007, America has a “diminished ability to influence people,” there has been “an erosion of American power” and at the same time a “solidification of anti-Americanism as a political idea.”

He suggests that the solution is for the U.S. to make Al Jazeera widely available:

Counterinsurgency has been called armed social science. To win, you must understand the world you’re in.

Comparative courses in how Al Jazeera, CNN, the BBC and U.S. networks portray the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be taught in all U.S. high schools and colleges. Al Jazeera English should be widely available.

This is a good idea for those studying the media, or writing about it, or producing it—I’ve been saying so myself for a good long while. We do indeed need wider knowledge of the world, and how the U.S. is perceived.

That’s no reason, however, to call for making Al Jazeera’s propaganda widely available to an already credulous and ignorant public.