

Al Jazeera English: The Most Hated Name in News - golwengaud
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/2009.10-media-the-most-hated-name-in-news/

======
Avshalom
I started watching Al Jazeera a few years back because they were the only news
network with a live web broadcast ( <http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/#>
) when I didn't have cable. I pretty much fell in love with it for everything
the article points out.

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.

~~~
ericd
Wow, I'm incredibly excited to have AJE potentially coming to the US. I can't
stand to watch the news anymore, it's gotten so bad... I always feel like it's
a game of spot-the-partisan-bias.

Now if only there were a way to help them get picked up by a network...

~~~
dailo10
I get their channel over the air here in DC. You should check if it's
available in your city. Their next major hurdle is to get on cable.

"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."

~~~
ericd
Ah yeah, sorry, I meant cable. I should check, though, thanks for the
reminder.

------
barrkel
I found this disturbing:

"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."

~~~
puredemo
As it should. Some detainees have been held there for over seven years without
charges being pressed.

[http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/11/20...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/11/20/guantanamo)

~~~
barrkel
I just wonder how many spies the CIA / whoever has working in media
organizations, i.e. folks who didn't take the hard way out of Guantanamo.

------
rdtsc
From the article (quoting Philip Seib):

\---

Comparing it with the American networks "is like comparing The Economist to
Newsweek."

\---

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.

~~~
Avshalom
> 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.

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.

~~~
yardie
CNN started out this way. 24 hour news coverage of international events.
Overtime it became more US-centric until it was the same 1 hour news reported
24 times per day.

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.

------
andyjdavis
I found Al Jazeera was unusual in that after watching it for any length of
time I actually felt more knowledgeable for it. In particular their programmes
like "Empire" were always educational.

Take this for example.
[http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/empire/2009/11/20091...](http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/empire/2009/11/20091124161117526700.html)

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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_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.

------
tokenadult
It depends on which circles you run in what is the most hated name in news.
Among many people I know, that would be Fox News. For at least some, it would
be one of the major United States broadcast networks, e.g. CBS or NBC.

~~~
dasil003
Among journalists, Fox News is without a doubt the most hated because of how
they undermine the very concept of journalism. However among government
officials, probably Al Jazeera takes the cake because governments prefer Fox's
predictability over investigative journalism any day of the week.

------
simc
I watch Al Jazeera English sometimes and IMHO it is better than CNN
International and nearly as good as BBC World.

~~~
pavs
A lot of their employees are ex-BBC staff.

------
ivenkys
Al Jazeera and BBC are by far the top two news organisations in the world.

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.

~~~
laut
BBC has government funding. That's not independent.

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.

~~~
arethuza
Have you ever actually listened to an interview by the BBC of a government
minister?

Have a look at this classic:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BklT7Qy07Is>

~~~
laut
Why do you ask? What's the point?

~~~
arethuza
Pretty much every government that has been in power in the UK hates the BBC
because they _can't_ control it.

------
jackfoxy
"After years of sacrificing qualified reporting staff to the bottom line, and
substituting public relations (press releases barely rewritten, press
conferences reported verbatim) for costly investigative journalism, the media
corporations that, starting in the ’90s, convinced regulators that
consolidation was essential to their survival have found themselves with
little immunity against the financial crisis."

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.

~~~
golwengaud
Not quite, as there's only one independent clause: "the media corporations
[...] have found themselves with little immunity against the financial
crisis."

But it is an exceedingly complex sentence, with an unusual number of dependent
clauses and other things.

~~~
jackfoxy
You're right. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-on_sentence>

------
sekou
"And what of the assumption that everyone with access to the Internet or a
camera phone will fill the gap? "Citizen journalism," he says, "is like
citizen dentistry." Without trained journalists expending the time and
resources to find out what is going on, the risk in places such as the United
States -- where the news can seem like an endless lunatic carnival in which
the outside world doesn’t exist -- is not only of becoming cut off from
reality and developing skewed perceptions."

CNN needs to realize that broadcasting random tweets helps no one.

------
RK
I watch Worldfocus sometimes on PBS and they run Al Jazeera English reports
all of the time.

Edit: Looks like Worldfocus stopped airing as of April 2, 2010.

------
pavs
I don't see a single ad on Al Jazeera english website. How do they survive? I
know it is funded by a rich seikh.

~~~
mahmud
Al-Jazeera English doesn't have ads but Al-Jazeera's Arabic channels do.

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.

------
s3graham
It's totally silly, but I love hearing the accents change with each story.

------
ars
It looks like the only way to have good journalism these days is if it's paid
out of someones private pocket.

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?

~~~
yardie
American news, internationally, isn't bad. Just the schlock they show in the
US is bad. A good American company with good international coverage is CNN
International. If you were to watch it you wouldn't believe they share the
same name.

BTW, CNN International is considered a premium channel that I've only seen
carried in major hotels and as a subscription.

