I honestly don’t see how you can find any ambiguity in what Arnett said.
He is saying that there will be resistance to US policy if lots of Iraqis die, and for that reason the Pentagon is insisting that the missiles are really Iraqi. (He is wrong; the official word is that they might have been Iraqi missiles.)
I don’t see how you can get from that that they are really Iraqi missiles, wink or no.
Arnett is reinforcing the Iraqi party line, that accusations that the missiles are Iraqi are lies fueled by the Pentagon’s desperation.
If Arnett’s tongue is really in his cheek, I would have expected him to say so, now that he is safely out of reach of the Iraqis. He has not done so, and AFAIK he was speaking out of complete sincerity. God help him.
I recommended al-Jazeera; he has chosen The Daily Mirror. Is there much difference?
This slate article changed my opinion. Like it says, he got fired for the wrong reasons. It’s not wrong for a journalist to talk to the enemy, or to offer opinions, and NBC’s lame shifty reasons don’t stand up. What he should be fired for is babbling on in an uninformed and often factually unsupported way. He speculates as if what he was saying were facts.
Al-Jazeera’s standard of reporting is fairly good, and their operational philosophy certainly seems sound. Most importantly though, this is the first Arabic channel native to the region that is not under the influence or censorship of a state. They’re not allowed to report in Qatar, where al-Jazeera is based, but not too much happens in that tiny kingdom anyway. Other than that al-Jazeera reports with a degree of freedom, objectivity, and thoroughness not previously exhibited by a Middle Eastern medium.
Which is not surprising, since the station was born out of the ashes of the BBC TV Arabic Service after the latter was disbanded by the Saudi part-owners, who disapproved of the world-famous BBC style of reporting (i.e., probably because they refused to toe the Saudi line when reporting on certain issues). The king of Qatar persuaded most of the former BBC staff to relocate to Doha and set up al-Jazeera in 1996, staffing the brand new station with some of the best-trained media people in the world, and definitely the best in the region.
Since then al-Jazeera has pissed off virtually every leader in the region with its unabashed, objective, and sometimes critical coverage of issues that most leaders would prefer to keep under cover. It has caused more than one diplomatic incident for Qatar – for example, Lybia withdrew its ambassador in protest to some al-Jazeera coverage. The king of Qatar, to his credit, continues to support al-Jazeera and remains a proponent of democracy, something he wants to bring to Qatar. Indeed, it may be surmised that his goal in setting up al-Jazeera was to reduce the censorship of both news and opinion that is prevalent across the Arabic-speaking world, thereby setting some of the foundations for democracy – across the entire region, not just in a single state.
Consider some of the coverage by al-Jazeera: women’s rights, the poor state of democratic representation in the region, pros and cons of peace with Israel, interviews and debates with dissidents as well as figures of regional authority, and so on. Jordan has accused al-Jazeera of inciting violence, Egypt has launched several attacks against the station’s “sex, religion, and politics”, and the house of Saud has objected strongly to them more than once, growling “we know what you’re doing”. What they’re doing is providing a taste of freedom for a big chunk of the world. All that’s required, anywhere in the region, is a cheap satellite dish.
Al-Jazeera has been accused of being the mouthpiece of Bin Laden, idiocy that barely deserves mention. They’ve been criticized by the US recently for showing POWs images, and their coverage is by necessity tilted at an Arab (versus a Western) slant — but then again look at FOX and the other trash channels so popular in the US, as well as the better but still nothing to write home about likes of CNN (all of which, by the way, didn’t seem to have a problem showing images of Iraqi POWs, on the contrary). None of those channels could be said to have anything other than an American bias, some of them quite extreme ones.
In other words political censorship on select issues – a lovely example of “freedom” from the Land of Freedom itself. Al-Jazeera’s approach (considered correct in terms of journalism if not politics) earns the channel such monikers as “the bin Laden Mouthpiece” and similar rubbish by those who don’t know any better. I recommend reading the entire article, in particular the last four or five paragraphs.
If you want to take cheap shots at an Arabic news channel, there are much better targets than al-Jazeera. For one I would suggest Hezbollah’s organ, al-Manar, which consists of a steady stream of deliberately inflammatory programming that could never come within a million miles of being called “objective”. Not that the other copycat satellite channels have really threatened al-Jazeera’s viewership, thankfully.
I want to clarify that this is not a blanket statement concerning al-Jazeera, and it certainly does not refer to anything but granting airtime to the different sides of an issue (which I was discussing).
Yesterday alone there Iraqis were knocked out of positions defending Bagdad and we seized large stocks of their war suplies. In the North, Iraqis were knocked out of their positions as well. Which war are you watching? It was inevitable that our advance would slow. What has been accomplished so far makes Afganistan look slow!
We asked. They refused. Fair enough. How is this censorship? They are under no obligation. In any event, Al-Jazeera is not exactly editorially neutral. They are as Anti-American as it gets, often enough.
Does it? If it does, then at best to people who flunked geography class. Only for those would it be surprising that there is a quick advance through the desert. Which is about the only thing that has been accomplished so far.
Hardly. They have an arab perspective. Not being worshipping the US doesn’t make them anti-american.