'A' For Al Jazeera

Israel,Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,Journalism,Media,Middle East,South-Africa,The West,War

            

I’ve said it before: The Al Jazeera news network practices better journalism than its American cable counterparts. Al Jazeera is as partisan as the local cable cretins, however, it does know news–the art of reporting.

Writes Eric Calderwood, for the Boston Globe:

[I]n a larger sense, Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.

For an American, to watch Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza is to realize that you’ve become alienated not just from war, but even from the representation of war as a real thing. As Americans, we’re used to hearing the sound of heavy artillery, machine guns, and bombs in action films and video games. Yet here on the news, they seem strangely out of place. You could argue that Al-Jazeera uses images of civilian violence to foment public outrage against Israel. This might well be true. At the same time, these images acknowledge human suffering and civilian death and stand strongly against them – and in doing so, foment outrage against war itself.

The complete essay is well-worth reading.

Worth watching is Al Jazeera’s “Saving Soweto”, a superb report detailing the heroic work of Christian and Jewish medical men in ministering to the multitudes. What would South Africa do without such people?! (Scroll down to “DESPERATELY SEEKING BOLLYWOOD’S BRANGELINA”)

One thought on “'A' For Al Jazeera

  1. Myron Pauli

    Both sides have understood the media/propaganda war. Blogwired.com has interesting articles on the Israelis in Gaza:

    http:blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/israelis-docume.html

    (and other links from there). Israel knows the Al Jazeera game and has to make its own videos as well – some to defend against accusations of “war crimes”. Other than Ohlmert’s idiotic boasting about the UN vote, the Israelis have been a bit smarter than in 2006 with Lebanon/Hezbollah. Still, war is an ugly business and not for the faint of heart. War is best avoided when possible – but having 7000 rockets landing on your territory makes it hard to avoid responding. And when one responds, it better be effective – and that means (unfortunately) ugly.

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