Al-Jazeera seems less biased than most US media - or at least they were being more informative about what was going on in Iraq. For that Rumsfeld ridiculed them.
http://www.controlroommovie.com/site/01.html-----
A review:
"Control Room, made by Jehane Noujaim, co-director of the wonderfulStartup.com, is a much needed counterpoint for Americans in the context of Bush administration propaganda on the Iraq War. Indeed, Control Room brings along its own heavy bias in favor of Al-Jazeera, which Donald Rumsfeld calls “Osama Bin-Laden’s mouthpiece” even as he provides his own version of American spin. While the documentary’s sympathetic portrait of Al-Jazeera supplies clear evidence where Al-Jazeera is right and the American government is wrong on certain Iraqi events, the Al-Jazeera reporters interviewed admit their bias. They don’t make ludicrous Fox News claims of being “fair and balanced.”Control Room shows how propaganda works on both sides and how the truth is often somewhere in between.
Al-Jazeera, launched in 1996, was the first independent news channel in the Middle East, and soon became the most popular news channel with over 40 million Arab viewers. Noujaim intercuts the film among several members of Al-Jazeera, including producers Sameer Khader and Deema Khatib, and the disgusted and bitter Hassan Ibrahim, a journalist who used to work for the BBC. At one point, an American reporter snidely says to him, “Everyone who works for the BBC eventually works for Al-Jazeera.”
Khader takes the most calm, philosophical approach to it all, asserting matter-of-factly the importance of media and propaganda in any war. He regrets the necessary involvement of cant, but begrudgingly admires how good the Americans are at it. Khatib, however, is the real cynic. He says if Fox News offered him a job, he would accept in an instant, and he plans to send his children to America one day for schooling. Hassan is the idealist. Adamant in his beliefs of American imperialism, he decries, “Eventually you’ll have to find a solution that doesn’t involve bombing someone into submission… democratize or I will shoot you.”
Most of the film takes place at Central Command, or CentCom, in Doha, Qatar, 700 miles from Bagdad. The film follows Bush’s threat of invasion through the toppling of Saddam Hussein. From Al-Jazeera’s perspective, Noujaim recalls the Bush administration’s changing rationales for invading Iraq, the use of fear in the media to manipulate public opinion, Jessica Lynch, the juvenile deck of cards designating the most wanted men in Hussein’s regime, and the too-coincidental-to-be-accidental bombing deaths of three different Arab journalists on the same day by American planes. From Rumsfeld accusing Al-Jazeera of faking pictures of civilian deaths, Noujaim cuts to indisputable pictures of real victims from the American bombing....
http://www.culturevulture.net/Movies8/ControlRoom.htm
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
