I saw this show last week. This review is accurate, IMO.
Lessons Well Learned From the American Networks
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY - NEW YORK TIMES
The Arab television network Al Jazeera was the CNN of the Iraq war: as admired, reviled and indispensable as the Atlanta-based 24-hour news network was during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
And because it covered the Iraq war from an Arab perspective, showing everything from tapes of a gloating Osama bin Laden to Iraqi tapes of terrified American prisoners of war, many American viewers still view the network with suspicion.
"Exclusive to Al Jazeera," a behind-the-scenes look at Al Jazeera's news operation during the war, shows that we have only ourselves to blame. What quickly becomes obvious in this beguiling "Wide Angle" documentary, to be shown tonight on PBS, is that Al Jazeera holds itself up as a model of the kind of American-style competitive, independent broadcast journalism that the United States tries to promote around the world.
In one tense control room moment, Omar Bec, the network's head of news gathering, became incensed when he learned that Al Arabiya, an upstart rival Arab satellite news network, was picking up Al Jazeera's live feed from Baghdad without permission. "Is Majid there?" Mr. Bec barked in Arabic, staring at a monitor. (The documentary provides subtitles.) "Get him in front of the camera now! Right away!"
Rival networks, he reasoned, would not want to use a live broadcast that had the Al Jazeera correspondent's face in the foreground.
From a satellite-studded cloud in heaven, William Paley and other founding fathers of television news must have swelled with paternal pride as they observed Mr. Bec's stiff-arm tactics.
When it was created in 1996 in the Persian Gulf country of Qatar, Al Jazeera was principally financed by the nation's emir. But its young news executives and reporters are feistily independent of any state control or censorship. So much so that when the Iraqi government wanted to expel two of its Baghdad correspondents during the war, Al Jazeera threatened to black out all its war coverage, and Iraq backed down. After the network showed explicit and disturbing images of dead American soldiers, as well as American prisoners of war, the New York Stock Exchange revoked the credentials of two Al Jazeera business reporters. (An Al Jazeera correspondent was later killed during an American bombing attack.)
Ibrahim Hilal, the news editor, who like Mr. Bec is young and speaks impeccable English, rationalizes his news decisions as any American network news executive would.
"What we are doing is just showing the reality," he said. "I know there are millions of shots we cannot get and will never get. But at least whatever we have we have to show to the whole world. This is a war." Al Jazeera was famously unsqueamish about showing close-ups of dead soldiers and wounded children; even in this PBS documentary, some of those are blurred to protect viewer sensitivities.
Perhaps the other striking difference between Al Jazeera's news sense and an American network's is the role of prayer in coverage planning. Khalid Mahmood, a reporter for the network in Qatar, splendid in white flowing robes and headdress, serves as the documentary's somewhat officious guide to the United States military's press center in Qatar. At one point he confides to the camera that he has decided to go to Baghdad to cover the bombing victims, saying he is not worried about the danger. Later, he explains that Allah has ordered him to alter his assignment.
"I didn't expect that," he says blandly. "But it's only God who knows what is good or bad, so it is not for me to determine whether this is right or not right thing for me to do."
nytimes.com |
