I have become really impressed with the English version of the Al Jazeera news site. It's true that it does display bias in that its reporting does not portray the US positively - but why should it? What has impressed me though is the level of investigative journalism (actually any level of investigative journalism impresses me because it seems to have all but disappeared in this country) - it is a lot more informed than comparable news outlets in this country. I'm sure this is no small part due to ownership - not that I know who owns Al Jazeera but I'm pretty positive it's not Murdoch. I also like their section titled 'Conspiracy Theories'. It's much like the Aus headlines, except it's branded for what it is. Consider the headline we had here when Arafat died stating that Arafat may have been poisoned. The same headline appears on Al Jazeera - but in their conspiracy theories section. When I first learned of this news outlet, I considered them terrorism inciting hacks. And then I realised that I had only learned this from our news. I visited their arabic website, and found a lot of photos of children with their heads blown off. I did not understand the language and was shocked, even hated them for showing that - but without the story behind it - well, you can hardly judge a news outlet if you're seeing things from it out of context.
Then I thought about that style of upfront reporting. In Australia we see a very clean war. We see troops and tracer fire and the hole left in the road by the mortar. We cannot understand the rest of the worlds anger and horror. Until we look at their reporting. If we saw the full video of the beheading, the dead bodies in the streets and wounded children - would we want this war to continue?
Would we have agreed to go in the first place?
Is it really news if we are being sheltered from what really happens?
Our news uses the past Iraqi regime as justification for military action inside Iraq and complains when Al Jazeera views unalderated footage of that action claiming that if they didn't do that there would be a dictator, that Muslims are to be feared etc etc. But if that is true, where is the counter-footage showing comparable Arab/Islamic actions?
The truth is there is none. Al Jazeera is not biased, it is simply showing what there is. It shows Arabs beheading civilians, and Americans destroying a country. In comparison, what does our new show us?
"Newsworthy."
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