[...] Aside from a fuzzily Third World orientation, there's nothing contentious about the vast majority of the programming. Live, looping coverage starts with the same top stories playing on most other news nets. Below the top line are stories that AJE's competitors probably wouldn't mention (i.e. election results from Mauritania).You'll want to read the rest.
The interview shows do not feature Keffiyehed Islamic scholars calling for a thousand more bin Ladens: The line-up of guests on Riz Khan's One on One, for instance, includes Nobel-winning economists and Bollywood stars. The net effect is less than revolutionary.
If not as joltingly distinct as promised, this is still the face of Al Jazeera that its defenders like to defend. Their line is that the network's Arabic-language parent is a world class press that breaks taboos and represents views of the Arab street; AJE translates those, and other perspectives from the "global south" into the world's lingua franca. The implicit suggestion is that everyone is better off for it.
ON ONE OF THE DAYS I was watching, the London desk had breaking news from Gaza. A hundred-plus Hamas gunmen had formed a human shield around their leader's house to ward off an Israeli air strike. This began a string of short reports on recent events in the Strip: The U.N. Assembly had voted overwhelmingly to condemn Israel; accompanying footage showed Palestinian bodies. The next item was Israel's bombing of a building that housed (AJE authoritatively asserted) a charity. The broadcast made no mention either of what the Israelis believed the building contained or why the Israelis were attacking in Gaza in the first place. [...]
If this isn't propaganda for America's enemies, that's only because the definition of propaganda in today's constantly shifting media environment isn't perfectly clear. What is uniquely disturbing about AJE is the delivery: Right after the weather and sports scores, they give reports depicting Hamas gunmen as victims and the Islamic Army of Iraq as Arab minutemen. And as the channel cuts back to ideologically ho-hum stories on Ben Affleck's latest project, it's easy to see how unconsciously this all might be digested.
Of course, even this is different from the original flavor of Al Jazeera, whose broadcasts incite violence against Americans, whose panel show guests
suggest that the Nobel Prize is a Zionist plot, and whose reporters are doing time in Spanish jail, convicted of aiding al Qaeda. [...]
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Weekly Standard: "Al Jazeera, in English"
This is very well-written:
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