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The HOFFMAN WIRE Dec. 18, 2001
The broadcast media are supposed to be in the hands of only the elite. Any upstart who interferes with this monopoly control is viewed as a fiendish spoiler. This is the case with the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite news channel (http://www.kbs-tv.com/dev/arabicmain.html).
In "Arab TV's Strong Signal," Sharon Waxman of the Washington Post adds her hand-wringing to the growing Israeli-American alarm over the competition. Her statement that al-Jazeera's "other central topic is Israel's persecution of Palestinians, a constant litany of suffering and aggression," is delivered without irony; with the self-righteousness of an Establishment mediacrat who sees nothing wrong with American TV broadcasting Germany's persecution of Jews, "a constant litany of suffering and aggression," day in and day out. This persecution is of some 56 years vintage. What is happening in Palestine is contemporary. Still, the Washington Post doth protest. There is to be only one "litany of suffering" broadcast and we know who has a proprietary and perpetual copyright on it.
The article that follows Waxman's is from England's "Guardian" newspaper and reports on the US bombing of al-Jazeera's Kabul offices. Perhaps nothing so dramatically undercuts American rhetoric about our "free and democratic" System as the terror which the US directs against journalists who challenge American and Israeli propaganda. The US bombed Serb television studios during the Kosovo war and bombed al-Jazeera's Kabul offices last month. Like the jailing of WWII revisionists in Europe, these "good" bombs show how necessary censorship is to the maintenance of the System's paper-thin rationale for the wars in Afghanistan and Palestine. Our rulers cannot tolerate competition in the free marketplace of ideas because such competition quickly reveals the bankruptcy of the White House, Hollywood and the New York media. Critics and dissenters must be silenced, even bombed and killed if necessary. This is not "fighting for freedom" as President Bush claims; it is state-terrorism on behalf of lies which cannot survive outside a milieu of religious awe and constant propaganda disguised as info-tainment.
-- Michael A. Hoffman II
Arab TV's Strong Signal
The al-Jazeera Network Offers News the Mideast Never Had Before, and Views That Are All Too Common
By Sharon Waxman Washington Post December 4, 2001 Page C1
CAIRO. The correspondent for al-Jazeera, the Arab world's all-news network, is reporting from a fetid tent city somewhere in Taliban-controlled territory in southern Afghanistan. The camera shows the wretched conditions: toddlers staring numbly, a woman having a seizure. The reporter talks to an elderly man crying over the deaths of his son, brother and cousin.
Then, standing in front of the pup tents of some Western journalists who have been doing similar stories, he notes: These correspondents will soon be going back to their comfortable quarters, while the Afghan refugees have no such hope. He concludes: "This is what the world's most powerful country has wrought upon the world's most wretched country."
This is the world according to al-Jazeera, the 24-hour Arabic-language news channel based in the tiny emirate of Qatar. It is hailed by many as a revolutionizing force among Arab media long constrained by limited resources and state controls. At any hour, Arab audiences can see news from the Mideast, European and American capitals gathered by a large staff of Arab reporters, not translated from a Western news service.
Audiences see news live, not recorded and packaged -- a refreshing change in a part of the world where rumor and conspiracy theory thrive. They watch heated talk shows unfold without editing or censorship. CNN has even forged a news-sharing alliance with the network.
But what kind of news is it? Al-Jazeera, for all its innovation, slick graphics and flashy logos, is not an Arab version of CNN. From watching the network for any length of time, it's clear that al-Jazeera takes a consistently hostile stance toward the United States. In al-Jazeera's world, the Taliban is invariably an underdog force, the United States looms as an occupying power, and Egypt and other moderate Arab states have knuckled under to the superpower's pressure. The channel's other central topic is Israel's persecution of Palestinians, a constant litany of suffering and aggression. Otherwise there is little on al-Jazeera except sports...
On a typical talk show recently the guest was a conservative Egyptian cleric, Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, and the topic, announced the host, was "Globalization, the new face of occupation." He outlined the economic gap between rich and poor nations, then his guest chastised the West.
"If you want to be the master and the master alone, that's occupation, and that we refuse," he said. "The problem with Western culture represented by the United States government, a unipolar power, is that it calls for immoral ethics based on monetary beliefs and sexual liberation. And that is against our values." The host heartily agreed.
...The commercial break over, al-Jazeera returns to a heated debate among a moderator, an online journalist from the Arab Voice and a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Christopher Ross, who is frequently called on to represent the American view because he speaks fluent Arabic. Today's topic is the American media and whether the U.S. government has been muzzling free expression in the name of fighting terrorism.
Both the moderator and the Arab guest say that it is. "Research shows that 155 people control the American media, and they are all in support of the war in Afghanistan," says the online journalist. "Arabs are not adequately represented in the media."
The host agrees. "The Americans, who are supposed to be for freedom of the press, are shutting up people who talk against them," he says, and refers to what he calls the "bombing" of al-Jazeera's office in Kabul by American forces....
"Why was al-Jazeera's office in Afghanistan bombed? Is this the free press the West has always preached about?" a booming voice asks, as the network's whirling, golden logo swivels dramatically between shots of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan and suffering civilians, another spin of the news cycle in the war-torn world of al-Jazeera.
(End)
How Smart was this Bomb?
Did the US mean to hit the Kabul offices of Al-Jazeera TV? Some journalists are convinced it was targeted for being on the 'wrong side.'
November 19, 2001 The Guardian
When (BBC) World Service correspondent William Reeve dived under his desk in Kabul to avoid shrapnel from the US missile that had landed next door, some think it marked a turning point in war reporting.
The US had scored a direct hit on the offices of the Qatar-based TV station Al-Jazeera, leading to speculation that the channel had been targeted deliberately because of its contacts with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. If true, it opens up a worrying development for news organisations covering wars and conflicts: now they could be targeted simply for reporting a side of the story that one party wants suppressed.
Nik Gowing, a presenter on BBC World, was determined to get the issue raised at last week's News World conference in Barcelona. While news executives spent most of the four-day event beating themselves up over how they had covered the September 11 disaster and its aftermath, Gowing and a number of fellow journalists wanted to alert their bosses to what they felt was a disturbing shift in US policy.
Gowing's argument was that Al-Jazeera's only crime was that it was "bearing witness" to events that the US would rather it did not see. Indeed there is no clear evidence that Al-Jazeera directly supported the Taliban - simply that it enjoyed greater access than other stations. Certainly, Al-Jazeera reflects a certain cultural tradition: but only in the same way that CNN approaches stories from a western perspective.
Gowing demanded that the Pentagon be called to account for the destruction of Al-Jazeera's Kabul office: Journalists now appeared to be "legitimate targets", he said. "It seems to me that a very clear message needs to go out that this must not be allowed to continue."
...it is not the first time journalists have been deliberately targeted: Serb television was deliberately bombed (by NATO) during the Kosovo conflict...
...the fact that Al-Jazeera has reported in such depth the other side of this conflict is troubling to the authorities. "Al-Jazeera has been providing some material that has been very uncomfortable," Gowing said at News World.
He believes that the western military forces are prepared to target journalists if they get in the way. He said that representatives of the British special forces had told him: "When a war is not declared, journalists are legitimate targets where they are inconvenient."
Ron McCullagh, of the independent production company Insight News, was another of those exercised by the implications of the incident. Other news organisations, by treating Al-Jazeera in a semi-detached fashion, had not helped: at the start of the war the BBC had described it as a "pro-Taliban broadcaster", McCullagh said. "This was a very dangerous thing to do. It could be used as an excuse for bombing them."
Al-Jazeera certainly believes it was a target. Speaking on the telephone to News World from Qatar, its chief editor, Ibrahim Hilal, said he believed that its Kabul office had been on the Pentagon's list of targets since the beginning of the conflict, but that the US did not want to bomb it while the broadcaster was the only one based in the city. By last week, however, the BBC had reopened its Kabul office under Taliban supervision, with the correspondents William Reeve and Rageh Omar.
On Monday, Al-Jazeera executives in Qatar called their correspondent in Kabul and told him to leave, because they feared for his safety after the Northern Alliance took over. But after assurances from the Alliance that he would be safe, the reporter, Tasir Alouni, decided to stay. He did not tell Qatar of his decision - that night, his office was bombed. At the time, Reeve was being interviewed on BBC World from his bureau in the same street. Pictures of him diving under his desk to avoid fall-out from the blast have been widely shown on BBC TV.
Hilal said he believed the attack was deliberate and long-planned. US officials have criticised Al-Jazeera's coverage of the bombing campaign as inflammatory propaganda. The station reaches more than 35 million Arabs, including 150,000 in the US. ...Speaking to the conference from the US military's central command center in Florida, spokesman Colonel Brian Hoey denied that Al-Jazeera was a target. "The US military does not and will not target media. We would not, as a policy, target news media organisations - it would not even begin to make sense." He said that the bombing of Serb television in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict was a different issue - the targets in question "appeared to have government facilities associated with them".
Co.l Hoey said the Pentagon did not have the location co-ordinates of the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul even though the broadcaster said it had passed them on, several times, via its partner CNN in Washington.
...What can't be disputed is that Al-Jazeera was hit...
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