Watch al-Jazeera To Get Smart, Not BBC or CNN

There's a feature in a recent issue of Newsweek that reiterates something many probably already acknowledge: al-Jazeera is now the international news channel to be reckoned with. Sure its lapses now and again into bashing the West may be grating to occidental audiences, but hey, that may be a good thing. The logic here is that persons think through their beliefs more when challenged, stimulating their intellect in the process. Hence, the worldviews which underlie much of al-Jazeera coverage may prompt those with more whitebread notions about the white man's burden in civilizing us primitives to rethink such ideas.

And so the fourth best way to get smart in 2012 according to Newsweek is...

Don’t shut yourself out from new ideas. A 2009 study found that viewers of Al Jazeera English were more open-minded than people who got their news from CNN International and BBC World.

If even the hopelessly Amerocentric Hillary "Internet Freedom" Clinton cites al-Jazeera for its breadth and depth of coverage compared to its Western counterparts, isn't it time for you to do the same?