[I’ve seen Cecil answer questions like this which may have some basis for subjectivity, therefore I’ll post it in GQ. If it belongs in GD or IMHO, would a mod kindly move it? Thanks.]
Seems every day I listen to the news, they announce that the Aljazeera news station is showing another video of a decapitation, U.S. Marine bleeding to death, or threat from a top radical Muslim cleric. Without overtly saying so, does Aljazeera support fundamentalist militant Islam? If so, why does no one decry them as sympathizers to death and destruction? If not, why would they be so quick to post the aformentioned gruesome media?
Adam
Most fundamentalists criticize Al-Jazeera for being too pro-west. Sometimes true objectivity means pissing off everyone.
I think it goes too far to say Al Jazeera are “pro-Fundamentalist”.
Al Jazeera is a news agency and they are reporting the news relevant to their coverage area.
Al Jazeera is a business before it is anything though. They know who their market is and they know what plays well and what doesn’t. No different than any news organization in the United States.
It could be argued that the news in the United States should show beheadings and other ugliness from the war. Instead we get a sanitized version which does not convey the horrors of war (this one is best left for GD).
Bottom line is Al Jazeera provides the product it thinks its consumers want and over there that is beheadings. That it may serve to support fundamentalists is a side-effect and one I doubt they care about one way or another.
Also, do not forget that freedom of the press over there is not like here. Al Jazeera needs to be careful not to do anything that pisses off various governments too much lest they get banned and lose business.
First off, it’s impossible to say that they’re simply “pro-fundamentalist” in that there are more than one sort of Islamic fundamentalism and those branches don’t necessarily agree with each other.
There has never been as much debate on Arabic language TV [possible exception of Lebanon?] as there has been on Jazeera. Did you know that sometimes representatives from Israel and the US are guests?
It is a business, but one supported by generous patronage of the Qatari royal family, the al-Thanis. (The one country you can count on the station not doing hard-hitting reports from is Qatar…) The US government is currently pressuring the Qataris to sell off the station as we don’t like their equal time and multiple viewpoints policies, which should raise questions about press freedom attitudes here as opposed to there.
News abroad shows a lot more footage of dead people and carnage than we do; we seem to have traded that in for sex, which is “OK” here and not there. The vast majority of the dead and wounded shown on Arabic TV are Arabs, mostly Iraqis and Palestinians, but then they comprise most of the dead and wounded in the region by a long shot. It’s this bloody reality that Americans find unpleasant and would prefer the Arab world not to have access to any longer. Incidentally, US troops have struck and killed reporters at Jazeera satelite uplink stations twice , the second time after giving the Pentagon their updated coordinates so that no one could claim it was a mistake.
I used to watch a-J every evening when I lived in Qatar; my Arabic is limited but you don’t need much sometimes, such as when they show long periods of footage of the aftermath of a suicide bomber or missile strike with minimal narration. Altogether I find this approach far less brainwashing than our TV news.
Without strying into GD too much, A-J isn’t pro-fundamentalist. Unless you count Fox News as pro-fundamentalist christian. They both cater to their audiences.
Take a look at their website. It’s little different to any other mainstream news outlet: “Kurds await independence vote result”…“Jail term for ex-Yugoslav general”…“Alzheimer’s tied to hormone drop”.
As for specifically showing execution videos and the like…there’s two different issues. Firstly, whether the west is more sensitive to images of westerners dying than of Arabs dying. Secondly, there’s cultural differences in the attitudes towards death in general.
But why does Al-Jazeera receive these tapes in the first place? It seems pretty obvious to me that an Arab organisation is going to be an easier one for fundamentalists to get a tape to via an intermediary than, say, CNN.