Here’s a fascinating admission by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And that ABC News is reporting on it is all the more fascinating.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it clear today that she is worried the United States is losing what she calls the “information war” abroad.

China and Russia, she says, have started English-language networks that push their message overseas and even the Taliban controls the airwaves in Afghanistan.

And in the Arab world? Al Jazeera is king, and Clinton says she can see why.

“Al Jazeera has been the leader in that are literally changing people’s minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective,” she said.

“In fact 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,” she added.

I’d rather not get into the idea of an “information war,” and this implication that we need better propaganda outlets stationed around the world. But on the core point here, how can you argue with Clinton? Al Jazeera has run circles around every competitor since the beginning of the Arab uprising. They probably did so well before that, too, it’s just that they were so invisible in the US. But they provide “real news,” as Clinton said.

I happened to be on Al Jazeera one time. The lineup went like this: protests in Yemen, protests in Iran, protests in Bahrain, me talking about the Obama budget. I wanted to say “can you just skip me?” The segment was fine and the interviewer was knowledgeable on the subject, but I felt like the broadcast was doing pretty well without me. They have the kind of foreign news bureaus and deep coverage that used to characterize US media, and they don’t resort to some dude talking about some subject from a comfortable studio, like, you know, me.

Al Jazeera is changing the way Muslims view the world, and it ought to change the way news is produced. But in this corporate media environment, it probably won’t. In fact, there’s a concerted effort to keep Al Jazeera English off of American television, perhaps so that nobody gets any ideas about how news can be delivered.

AJE gets a half-hour on KCET (the former public television channel) in Los Angeles every night. They used to have BBC News in that spot. I think that’s telling.