The Control Room

Just finished watching The Control Room on Newsworld (blogged here) last night. It gives a look inside the newsroom of Al Jazeera television and how they covered the US invasion of Iraq.

On balance I'd say that, from what I had seen of their coverage, it wasn't the highest quality all of the time, however, they did show a lot of footage that the US mainstream media never touched.

The US Department of Defense kept denouncing Al Jazeera as an anti-American propaganda network. However the Saudi Arabian government also regularly denounces the network for showing things it doesn't want shown to its own people. They are funded by a Qatari prince who wanted to create an independent Arabic news channel, and who seems to have left them alone to produce the news as they see fit. Control Room mainly focuses on the producer of the war coverage, who formerly worked for BBC World News, so they also have top-quality journalistic pedigree there, though also their share of inexperienced people.

One part of the film showed the US secretary of defense Rumsfeld on television denouncing Al Jazeera for not being proper journalists, while at the same time they showed the producer berating an interview producer for booking an American anti-war radical on the news program, saying that it is opinion and not news and doesn't belong on the news. Not something you'd likely hear as being a problem in a place like CNN, and as Outfoxed showed, such tactics are par for the course for the Fox news channel.

They also extensively interview the American military liaison, a young soldier named Joshua Rushing, who's job was to provide the US government's point of view to Al Jazeera's viewers. At first he was expectedly pro-American, and criticized Al Jazeera for showing pictures which he said would make the US look like monsters. But one of the most compelling moments of the film was him saying that normally when Al Jazeera showed pictures of bombing victims he would feel bad but go on about his day as normal. However one day they showed footage of a room full of dead US soldiers lying on the ground and he said he was sick to his stomach for the rest of the day, and that it finally hit home that this is how most Arabs watching will feel when they see the rest of the footage of war victims. He said it made him hate war to realize this, not something one would expect to hear from a soldier, especially one trained in media relations.

Perhaps part of the reason why US coverage is so far removed from what's happening on the ground is that they simply aren't capable of sending a camera man out of the 'safe zone' in Baghdad without putting him or her in serious danger, and for aesthetic reasons might be reluctant to rely too heavily on external footage. But that's where they should put seeking the truth ahead of their production quality concerns, remembering what they're actually supposed to be for.

Perhaps as a business required to make a profit CNN simply doesn't want to repel too many viewers, and perhaps Al Jazeera is showing inflammatory pictures to draw an audience (though they're less dependent on commercial revenue..) In the end, though, the fact that one side of the world gets one version of events and the other side of the world gets another is the reason why the US is going to have a long hard time getting anywhere in the Middle East colonialism they seem to have found themselves in.