carl guderian on Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:11:02 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Old & new media, CNN & Al Jazeera |
Indeed. As opposed to high-level (TV mostly) journalism in the US, which shies away from even the most obvious social or political wrongs, afraid of accusations of not being "objective" (actually conflating it with "balance," degrading both concepts). There's always someone arguing for torture, predation, etc., because there's money in it, and Wolf Blitzer on CNN will let them lie, dodge questions or just repeat their "talking points" until the clock runs out or the viewer tunes out in disgust. It's a win either way and "objectivity" is preserved. (The BBC is sometimes guilty of this too. While al-Jazeera showed Egyptian protestors describing their torture, BBC on Thursday night gave airtime to sleazy neocon and former Director of the CIA James Woolsey arguing for "tough choices" like supporting Mubarak to ensure peace with Israel and keep the Muslims down. (Shame they didn't mention Mubarak trying to save his skin by spreading rumors that foreign journos are working for "teh Jews.")) A week into the revolt, was Farid Zakaria, ex-pimp for the Iraq war and CNN's foreign expert anywhere near Egypt, for the biggest story in that country's 5000 years of existence? No, he was in Davos, watching the Great Men of history jerk each other off about saving the world while they took a break from dodging taxes, blocking regulation and chasing after labor cheaper even than robots. Christiane Ammanpour did her part by interviewing the Great Man himself, not too confrontationally of course. She's no Orianna Fallacci, that's for sure (neither, apparently, was Orianna, always, but whatever). Idiots flatter CNN by calling this revolt al-Jazeera's "CNN moment." But the "CNN moment" was about being able to fill a 24-hour news cycle during the 1991 Iraq war. It wasn't about the quality, though their reach, reporting and analysis were pretty good compared to those of the competition. But al-HJazeera's engagement, competence and willingness to take real risks to get the story and report it accurately, incidentally demolishing a lot of self-serving myths (such as "teh Muslims are gonna wreck the country!")--in short, doing journalism that matters--makes this their *al-Jazeera* moment. I wish CNN would have an al-Jazeera moment. Carl # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org