timberlandko wrote:I note that even Al Jazeera is a bit less Pro-Regime than has been the case.
Asherman wrote:Frolic seems to prefer getting his news from Al Jazeera.
So, how do you folks know about what Al-Jazeera reports? Can you watch & understand Al-Jazeera?
Last night I watched a program on the third public TV station here. The VPRO had devoted an episode (of an hour) of their current affairs program to excerpts from Arab TV news. No comments, no reportage, just a window on what the Arab countries get to watch: a collage of subtitled footage from Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Al-Manar.
It was absolutely fascinating! Very interesting indeed. Both b/c of the actual news they broadcast, and b/c of the realisations it made you have about what arabs see.
The stations were hugely different.
Al-Manar from Lebanon, nicknamed "Hezbollah TV" is simply - evil. One big, high-intensity, highly emotional, merciless barrage of rhetorical impact, that seemed to have one single objective: to make you angry, no - outraged, bitter, infuriated. It was truly goering-esque. The music always dramatic, underscoring an endless sequence of gory images of victims of - always - israeli violence, rhetorical questions emblazoned on the screen, creative collages of bush next to hitler, interviews with 11-year old girls from hebron swearing revenge and martyrdom against zionism - on and on and on. hell, after just ten minutes of that i felt like coffee-overdosed myself; imagine how someone personally involved in the images must get to feel watching night after night of that.
The other two stations were wholly different, though.
Al-Arabiya (from Saudi-Arabia) made an in-between impression. Pretty regular, CNN-like fare, with the odd excursion into making a point (i.e., a collage of the voice of Bush warning about respecting the geneva convention on POWs with a sequence of images of Iraqi POWs filmed by TV).
Al-Jazeera is pretty much BBC World on speed. The material seemed very objective - or very varied, at least - they had the US spokesmen, the Iraqi spokesmen, neither was praised nor ridiculed in comment or asides; they had footage from Iraq, from protests in Australia (but also about the protests turning violent); yet they had sketches on American soldiers as well, and analysts warning about Saddam's record of terror and the danger of his possible chemical weapons. Very wide range of sources and materials, it seemed.
The main difference between Al-Jazeera, judging on this material, and BBC World for example, is not one of bias or angle at all; it's more about style than anything else. Al-Jazeera seems more breathless, more intense. And Arab stations apparently have no problem in showing blood or shocking scenes - about whichever country. In the US, the fact that Al-Jazeera showed those dead Americans and the POWs was interpreted as anti-Americanism; in fact, such materials simply seem common fare there.
Anyway - more about Al-Jazeera in the news article I'll translate in a post below.
Btw, Asherman, I responded to a post of yours at length above - others did too, I believe - would you care to respond to the arguments?