Al Jazeera- School Me

turboswede wrote:

fanfoy wrote: I quite like A/J for international news. They are obviously Muslim biased, but overall I find them a lot less biased than any American news agency. And they seem to be one of the last real news agency that goes out to get the news instead of just re-reporting what others have reported and then bringing in some analyst to tell me how I should interpret the news. If you take time to notice, the international images that they show on most western news channel often comes from them. Honestly, I just came back from a three week trip to the US, and the state of the news agencies over there is scary. I wanted to close the TV with a brick, whenever I had the misfortune to see CNN, Fox News, or whatever other trash was on. I don't know how you guys can accept this kind of garbage.

Its true. They are horrible (all of them). I've seen some of Al Jazeera's news reports along with the BBC's and they are both pretty good compared to the US networks. There's a reason why people watch The Daily Show and the Colbert report, they do provide some counterbalance to the US news networks by calling them on their BS and they don't hide their opinions as news. The News agencies could help reduce the cultural divide that is growing in this country, they could focus on following the basic tenants of Journalism by sticking to reporting the facts without adding opinion or spin, they could spend less money on flashy news readers and more on real journalists that work in the field getting news from the sources. They could do this and still make money since advertisers only care about eyes on the screen. Instead they are relying on the AP to provide a skeleton of a story and then filling in the gaps with BS to keep people watching and to provoke an emotional response.

Fox, CNN, and MSNBC all have hard news shows- in the early afternoon and in the middle of the night.. but they put all their "editorial" shows on during the times when anyone actually watches, and those "editorial" shows watch each other to see how they are supposed to craft their story lines for the week to better contradict each other...

my favorite news shows are the Daily Show on Comedy Central and Red Eye on Fox.. i was a fan of Crossfire on CNN before they started getting into the "fighting with each other because they were supposed to" routine. Bill Press and Tucker Carlson were the perfect counterbalances to each other's viewpoints..

We get Al Jazerra here on the on base channels. Aside from some obvious bits, pretty neutral, until it involves Isreal. What is interesting is some of their special features. Hour long or so documentaries about some pretty interesting stuff, and usually well produced.

a few months back was a really interesting piece on Norman Mayer ; the guy that held the Washinton Monument hostage in 1982 to protest nuclear proliferation and some character studies into his associates.

There have also been others; one about a poor neighborhood in Iran where the only hope the young boys have is grecko-roman wrestling and the coach who runs the gym. It was interesting to see the simularities between w boxing gym or football camp in a crappy neighbohood in the US. If I wasn't so lazy I'd link to them.