Anything But Al Jazeera

After reading through some of the O'Shaughnessy, I was getting looking foreward to the assignment to go onto the infamous Al-Jazeera's website and seeing for myself the horrible, despicable, and worst of all, biased reporting that, in my mind, would so contrast with the reporting in our country that would make our reporting look Toquevillian in comparison. Needless to say, I was greatly disappointed. The website looks very much like a regular, state-of-the-art news site with fading pictures, and black and whites, it looks calm and modern. As does the "English Al-Jazeera live". The reporting seemed unbiased to me and I couldn't help but questioning the reality of this so called, "propaganda war".

Ok, so they do quote some of Bush's less intelligent remarks, such as when he was questioned by reporters, afterwards remarking: "I was impressed by the questions they asked. They want us to succeed in Iraq, just like I want us to succeed. So we had a really good discussion." But other articles, especially the one about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was surprised to read a quite unbiased report.

This was a little surprising, but not really. If you think about it, President Bush and his administration have apparently been thinking for quite some time as to what kind of utopia would arise after the downfall of Al-Jazeera. In the article by Jeremy Scahill, he quotes the editors of The Nation who write in respnse to the debate over whether the leak by President Bush as to his intention of blowing up Al-Jazeera's base in Qatar, "...because if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press--particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press--upon which that country was founded."

Now, I'm not yet fluent in Arabic, but while looking through Al-Jazeera's website in its original language, I had a funny feeling I was not looking at the same unbiased reporting that was going on on the other side of the language barrier.