Al Jazeera English: The Most Hated Name in News
walrusmagazine.com
walrusmagazine.com
Great journalism, and journalists every where, actual journalists instead of celebrity talking heads. Debates are two people debating instead of yelling. They also don't have that Fox/CNN approach of going out of their way to portray both sides of every story as equal.
The documentaries are top notch too.
I wish I had more to add to the article, other than to say that I hope it does make good inroads to NA without changing.
Now if only there were a way to help them get picked up by a network...
"Al Jazeera English has finally broken into the United States. A non-profit educational broadcaster has agreed to carry it in Washington and twenty other American cities."
"On Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, meanwhile, Sami al-Hajj, a rookie cameraman with the station, was captured in what he believes was a case of mistaken identity (another cameraman named Sami had filmed an interview with bin Laden); he spent six years in Guantánamo before being released in 2008. The forty-year-old Sudanese national, who now walks like an old man, told me he was interrogated more than 300 times -- almost exclusively about Al Jazeera, on whom he was asked to spy."
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/11/20...
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Comparing it with the American networks "is like comparing The Economist to Newsweek."
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That's how I see it pretty much. I had accidentally stumbled on Al Jazeera English while channel surfing. Somehow I had always thought they were some shady, terrorist supported news outlet. I very much surprised at the quality of reporting and investigative journalism. They covered issues that actually matter in the world as opposed to "Tiger Woods has been thinking about a public apology" type crap or "Be afraid of killer fungus from outer space that eats your children" type stuff.
At the same time I don't know why CNN and other American network report junk. Don't they simply report what American public wants to see and hear? Isn't that a commentary on the quality of American viewers? They are in the business of selling the audience to the advertisers.
Some one once said that the 24 hour news cycle was the worst thing that ever happened to reporting. I think Al Jazeera works partly because it's unabashedly about the world for the world. They don't need as much filler because there actually is news happening 24/7 if you have a wide enough scope, and they can't use as many country specific celebrity general interest stories because they're even more irrelevant outside the specific country.
Also Al Jazeera is just better, but I think some of that is inherent in their mission statement.
CNN International is still fantastic. I watched it while in Singapore and was floored by the integrity of the journalists. Then I got back to the US and it was the same fluff pieces from the week before I left.
That's the problem journalism is facing - funding. Maybe more fundamentally, the divide between the social value of journalism and the monetary value.
I think everyone understands the first part of the problem - without money, a lot of journalism just goes away. You can't afford investigations, foreign bureaus, thorough research, etc. Even simple beat reporting gets worse when there aren't enough beat reporters to go around.
What worries me is the relatively unacknowledged second part of the problem: Journalists end up doing MORE of the things that cost less money, or are more profitable, even if they aren't really good journalism. Talking heads, sensationalist stories, reprinted press releases, etc. There's also the more subtle corruption of PR agencies and political operatives that want to "help" journalists "understand" what just happened - even if the journalist is savvy enough to fight back, it still takes time (which is money!) to do that. The less resources the journalist has, the easier they are to manipulate.
The social value of journalism is accurate information. But ever since Craigslist punched a hole in the bottom of the classifieds market and let out all the profit, journalists can only make MONEY by getting a lot of eyeballs in a short time. And everyone who's compared Reddit with HN knows what happens when information delivery turns into a short-term popularity contest for the public at large.
Take this for example. http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/empire/2009/11/20091...
Watching other news stations rarely makes me feel like I've learnt anything. Too many fluff pieces and too many short stories that quickly relay what happened but give you little insight into why. There was a bombing here, there was an accident there, this happened over here, thankyou for watching. Its all reporting and no analysis.
You have just NAILED exactly the reason I gave up on cable news years ago and now get most of my news from Public Radio. At least MPR has the decency to point out where they may have a conflict of interest with the stories they report on!
It is simply not enough to know that "X" happened. Often, why it happened, and how it can happen again, and what the consequences are is more important than the basic report.
The one common thing they have - independent funding, AJ funded by an oil sheikh and the BBC by the British public. May be that's the way forward , instead of citizen journalism we need citizen funding for news.
AJE is fantastic, by far and away the most rigorous, in depth, detailed and well researched news anywhere. However, the BBC is not what it used to be. Yes it's licence-payer funded, but in recent years the standards of rigour have definitely dropped. There's a lot more emphasis on magazine formats and light-weight simplified coverage catering for the twitter generation.
Ask yourself this: do you like the BBC because it supports things you already believe? This is an interesting exercise to do. Do you believe that what you believe is "truth" and therefore an organization that agrees must be impartial?
All independent funding means for the BBC is that they don't have to cater to an audience per se - it doesn't mean that they don't cater to the opinions of their own staff. A staff that is recruited mainly in one city, London, mainly through ads in one newspaper, The Guardian. It is not politically nor demographically representative of the British public, and many people here actively distrust it, and resent paying the tax that supports it.
Whilst I appreciate that this is a useful exercise to consider, if he was watching the BBC solely to affirm his own beliefs he would hardly be watching Al Jazeera as well.
> ... many people here actively distrust it, and resent paying the tax that supports it.
I don't know anyone that feels that way. Most of the people I've talked to on the subject have said that they trust the BBC more than any of the newspapers. Even in other countries, especially in the USA, I've met people who prefer to watch BBC World rather than their own news channels.
It far from perfect of course but my general impression has been thats its one of the most trusted news sources for most people.
Al Jazeera was founded by ex-BBC staff. They've a lot in common.
News reporting can't possibly be completely "unbiased". You have to choose what to focus on and how to report it.
I think the state controlling a big media institution is terrible.
Not strictly true, altho depends on definitions. It's funded by a licence fee which anyone who owns a TV has to pay, about £150 / year I think.
Have a look at this classic:
The BBC is independent of the government and the vast majority of its funding comes directly from the British public. From wikipedia:
According to the BBC's 2008–2009 Annual Report,[30] its income can be broken down as follows:
£3,493.8 million in licence fees collected from householders;
£775.9 million from BBC Commercial Businesses;
£294.6 million from government grants;
£41.1 million from other income, such as providing content to overseas broadcasters and concert ticket sales;
Boy does that ever qualify as a run-on sentence! But it does hit a lot of the points of what's gone wrong with journalism. I have noticed media-criticism is a popular past time on HN.
But it is an exceedingly complex sentence, with an unusual number of dependent clauses and other things.
CNN needs to realize that broadcasting random tweets helps no one.
Edit: Looks like Worldfocus stopped airing as of April 2, 2010.
>The original Aljazeera channel was started in 1996 by an emiri decree with a loan of 500 million Qatari riyals (US$137 million) from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa.[2][3] By its funding through loans or grants rather than direct government subsidies, the channel maintains independence of its editorial policy.[4][5] The channel began broadcasting in late 1996, with many staff joining from the BBC World Service's Saudi-co-owned Arabic language TV station, which had shut down in April 1996 after two years of operation because of censorship demands by the Saudi Arabian government.[6]
Following the initial US$ 137 million grant from the Emir of Qatar, Al Jazeera had aimed to become self-sufficient through advertising by 2001, but when this failed to occur, the Emir agreed to several consecutive loans[3] on a year-by-year basis (US$30 million in 2004,[7] according to Arnaud de Borchgrave). Other major sources of income include advertising, cable subscription fees, broadcasting deals with other companies, and sale of footage.[8] In 2000, advertising accounted for 40% of the station's revenue.[9]
Al-Jazeera is about 7-9 TV stations, mobile applications, and websites. I listen to their Arabic podcasts and 90% of them make me fear for their safety. The ungrateful little bastards went on air reporting on the discrepancy between oil exports reported by Qatar (their host nation) and the figures reported by the international markets. Concluding something like 25% was missing from the total!
I was certain I will not see al-Jazeera again, but they went on just fine, back to harassing other governments the very next day.
Their Op-Ed program (in Arabic: "al-itijah al-mu`akis" الاتجاه المعاكس) calls for the overthrow of all the non-democratic regimes in the middle-east, by which it means ALL of them.
People are assuming American news is bad because of some maliciousness, or incompetence, but actually it seems they just don't have the money.
Anyone know an American Billionaire who might be willing to start (or fund) a news network? Maybe Warren Buffett?
Oh wait....
BTW, CNN International is considered a premium channel that I've only seen carried in major hotels and as a subscription.