Al Jazeera

With a big splash, but with less audience, Al Jazeera premiered recently as the kinda sorta next big thing in U.S. cable news. The network vowed to focus on hard news, as opposed to the crap often seen on other cable networks (I'm talking about you, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC).

But what do people think about the network? Not much, if you believe this survey of over 8,000 respondents, and I especially like how they broke it down by state, including red states versus blue states, which you can pull off when your N is so big. Scroll down the page to find the maps.

Warning -- best I can tell, this is not a random sample. I can't tell at all how they got their respondents and that is, indeed, worrisome. That said, the numbers make sense.

Oh, you can see the raw data yourself on a Google docs page. Download it, if ya like, and crank away, though there's nothing there they don't show you on their graphs and maps.