Over the last few years, I've been consistently been impressed with Al-Jazeera news, being relatively impartial on news in Asia and serving as a good counterpoint to the American media. I've found they often report on and cover news that might be embarrassing to the US far in advance of other news outlets being embarrassed into covering it (or in the case of China, covering embarrassing news before it becomes interesting for North Americans ).
They've performed an outstanding role in covering the Arab Spring and a pivotal role in the first two WikiLeaks releases.
I have been kinda curious that their coverage of the last WikiLeaks release was kinda sparse and I guess we now know why after the full release.
quote:The Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel has announced Tuesday that its director has stepped down after serving the network for eight years.
Wadah Khanfar's resignation follows release of documents by Wikileaks, purporting to show he had close ties with the U.S. and agreed to remove some content in response to American objections.
The leaked 2010 U.S. diplomatic cable indicated that Khanfar was in constant contact with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, responding to U.S. complaints of negative coverage and promising to tone down items on the station's website.
I've been going on the quick assumption that the truth lay somewhere between the biased pro-US Western media and the biased pro-Muslim Al-Jazeera. The actual truth being much worse than even what Al-Jazeera shows is a significant re-calibration, IMO anyways.
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The description of the pieces not allowed to air doesn't seem to be anything we didn't already know was happening, e.g. babies and women being injured in the cross fire, or by accident.
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Assuming that we're being told the whole story.
There is only a description of one change (with references to but no details of the others) and an acknowledgement that they can't afford to have the full details of their agreement on paper (just in case of a leak like this).
The other issue is that emphasis and tone matters. The US has spent a lot of money since Vietnam on managing the media from embedding journalists to controlling/banning pictures of coffins returning home. There's a difference between knowing something in abstract and being presented with the full gruesome details.
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I often read Al-Jazeera English for my international news fix, and sometimes even for an outside perspective on American news. One of the things I've always liked about them is their outside point of view. I wouldn't call it objective, there's no such thing, but certainly it's excellent to hear great reporting from outside the echo chamber here in America.
Here's hoping they raise their standards again.
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