Eric Calderwood - An American on Al Jazeerah
I can understand why many people strongly believe that Al-Jazeera itself contributes to these regional hatreds. But after months of watching the network intensely, I can honestly say that I've never heard their newscasters frame an argument or a story in anti-Semitic or anti-American terms. And Al-Jazeera hosts one of the most ecumenical news programs I have ever seen on TV, anywhere: A morning spot called the "Press Tour," which shows images of newspapers from the United States, Europe, the Arab world, and (notably) Israel, and translates excerpts of the most important articles. Since the start of the current Gaza conflict, Al-Jazeera has expanded its coverage of the Israeli press into an entire nightly segment in which a newscaster reviews the lead articles in the major Israeli newspapers, with readable images of the Hebrew text they are translating. Many of them openly support the war and condemn Hamas, and some of them even condemn Al-Jazeera's coverage of the war. To think about how remarkable this is, imagine an American news anchor simply reading article after article from newspapers in Tehran, or Mosul, or even Paris.
posted by temporal at 1/31/2009
1 Comments:
I come a little late to this article of 1/18/09 which I just read this morning, and I wanted to communicate to the author who is perhaps too young to know firsthand. Graphic national media images of the horrors of war were a major factor in bringing an end to the Vietnam War, for precisely the reasons you cite. It was subsequently a deliberate decision on the part of individuals somewhere in media/political/military conglomerate to expunge those kinds of images in order to continue to conduct their military and political policy agendas--in other words to get the support of the American people to fight wars when and where the military-industrial complex deemed necessary.
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