*The Global War on Terror is pretty long in the tooth now, but to state that the Yankees suffer from a Soviet-style press repression is a new twist.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27830.htm
I Want My Al Jazeera
The lack of availability in the United States of international news
outlets is a cause for concern, author argues.
By Naomi Wolf
April 05, 2011 "Al Jazeera" — Al Jazeera correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin
is on a victory lap in the United States – or rather, Al Jazeera is
sending him on its own victory lap.
After all, Mohyeldin is a modest guy, despite being one of Al Jazeera's
best-known reporters – and clearly a rising international media star.
Al Jazeera has good reason to gloat: it has a new cachet in the US after
millions of Americans, hungry for on-the-ground reporting from Egypt,
turned to its online live stream and Mohyeldin's coverage from Cairo's
Tahrir Square.
So now Mohyeldin is in the US for three weeks of media events – there
will even be a GQ photo shoot – having become well known in a country
where viewers are essentially prevented from seeing his station.
The network has been targeted by the US government since 2003, when
former vice president Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld described it as tantamount to an arm of al-Qaeda.
Two of its reporters were later killed in Baghdad when US missiles hit
its office. Al Jazeera and others voiced suspicions that the channel's
reporters had been deliberately targeted. (((Oh come on, everybody
kills journalists, be fair.)))
And, to this day, Al Jazeera, which, together with BBC News, has become
one of the premier global outlets for serious television news, is
virtually impossible to find on televisions in the US.
The country's major cable and satellite companies refuse to carry it –
leaving it with US viewers only in Washington, DC and parts of Ohio and
Vermont – despite huge public demand. (((I wonder what's with those
parts of Ohio and Vermont.)))
So Al Jazeera is sending its news team around the US in an effort to
"mainstream" the faces of this once-demonised network. And Mohyeldin can
sound like Robert F. Kennedy: when the cry rose up from Tahrir Square
hailing Mubarak's abdication, he commented, "One man stepped down and
eighty million people stepped up."
The station's US push could hardly be more necessary – to Americans. By
being denied the right to watch Al Jazeera, Americans are being kept in
a bubble, sealed off from the images and narratives that inform the rest
of the world.
Consider the recent scandal surrounding atrocity photos taken by US
soldiers in Afghanistan, which are now available on news outlets,
including Al Jazeera, around the globe.
In America, there have been brief summaries of the fact that Der Spiegel
has run the story. But the images themselves – even redacted to shield
the identities of the victims – have not penetrated the US media stream.
And the images are so extraordinarily shocking that failing to show them
– along with graphic images of the bombardment of children in Gaza, say,
or exit interviews with survivors of Guantanamo – keeps Americans from
understanding events that may be as traumatic to others as the trauma of
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
For example, the leading US media outlets, including the New York Times,
have not seen fit to mention that one of the photos shows a US soldier
holding the head of a dead Afghan civilian as though it were a hunting
trophy. ((("as though"?)))
So, for America's sake, I hope that Al Jazeera penetrates the US media
market. Unless Americans see the images and narratives that shape how
others see us, the US will not be able to overcome its reputation as the
world's half-blind bully. (((A hundred percent blind bully – scarier,
or less scary?)))
Indeed, Egyptians are in some ways now better informed than Americans
(and, as Thomas Jefferson often repeated, liberty is not possible
without an informed citizenry). Egypt has 30 newspapers and more than
200 television channels. (((I guess that explains why the thriving
Islamic media have been breaking so much science and technology
news lately.)))
America's newspapers are dying, foreign news coverage has been cut to
three or four minutes, at most, at the end of one or two evening
newscasts, and most of its TV channels are taken up with reality shows.
(((As Marvin Minsky once remarked, "Imagine if television were
actually good. It would mean the end of everything we know."
Then the Web appeared and everything we knew promptly ended.)))
I met Mohyeldin before a recent public appearance in Manhattan. His
analysis of the Egyptian revolution, and others in the region, is that
the kind of globalised media to which Americans do not have full access
created the conditions in which people could rise up to claim democracy.
(((As far as I can figure, the Egyptians have in fact claimed a military
dictatorship so far, but it's true that a national army is slightly more "democratic"
than a family of elderly oligarchs.)))
He points out that, "People are aware of their rights from the internet,
from satellite TV – people are watching movies and reading bloggers.
This was a revolution of awareness, based on access to fast-travelling
information. The farmers, the peasants in Tahrir Square, were aware of
their rights."
Americans have a hunger for international news; it is a myth that we
can't be bothered with the outside world. Maybe Americans will rise up
and threaten to boycott their cable and satellite providers unless we
get our Al Jazeera – and other carriers of international news.
We would then come one step closer to being part of the larger world – a
world that, otherwise, will eventually simply leave us behind.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent
book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
