We don’t have Al-Jazeera International on Rogers cable or DBS satellite here (Toronto). And Rogers Cable has all sorts of stuff, including six channels in Russian and three in Tamil. Pity. I’d like to see it. It would balance out Fox News Channel.
I also wish we got CNN International instead of the US domestic service, which is rather vapid at times. And I hope we’ll get the France 24 news channel, but at least you can watch that off their website (at least for the time being).
The US media does fairly good job at ignoring any wrongdoing ever done by Israel and is heavily pro-Israeli in almost all reporting on Israel though. I don’t know enough on the religous makeup of the movers and shakers of the US media (which pretty sucks anyway, regardless) to make the same connection. I don’t think that his accusation is particularly nonsensical or hateful. Fundamentalists Christians are so often talked about negatively in this manner on the Dope, not too mention adherants to Islam, without it being called “hate speech.”
I believe we can be sure about one thing.
Al Jazeera will provide its English speaking viewers with a new version of reality, judging by this interview of Al-Jazeera Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Sheikh on 7 December 2006.
Targo
I was in Chicago a couple of summers ago and ate dinner at an Eritrean restaurant. They had Eritrean TV playing (in English, mostly). Whether they got via cable or dish I don’t know.
Eritrean cuisine, BTW, is much like Ethiopian – you get a mound of bite-sized pieces of meat in a spicy sauce, and mounds of mashed vegetables, both of which you eat on pieces of a damp, spongy flatbread.
FYI, The Daily Show is doing an “al-Jazeera Makeover” tonight! 
And they frackin’ nailed it! 
Come to think of it . . . al-Jazeera might do better in the U.S. if they had a name that didn’t invite comparisons to “jizz” . . . Though to me, it always calls to mind an old Cat Stevens song from the Numbers album: “They call me Jzero . . .” . . . which is even more apt since he changed his name to “Yusuf Islam” . . .
OK, I’ll stop free-associating now. For now.
I have Dish and we get link TV. They include INN and Mosaic. These are international news programs from around the world. Mosaic gets Israeli,Afgan,Irani,Iraqi, and Qatar viewpoints. But they are way too short. I would watch the Al Jazeera channel if it was available specially because the Al Jazeera web site is not working any more.
If Israel provided a program I would watch that too. Not enough news from the world is available. We miss viewpoints from South America,Central America ,Japan etc. We are too damn provincial.
It’s working. Here’s their website:
Speaking of which, you can watch it right from Realplayer or what-have-you on their website. I payed the 6 dollars a month to watch it high-resolution; it’s fascinating. And that Shahnaz Pakravan? SO fine.