Al Jazeera

View the trailer for Control Room, a documentary about Al Jazeera and its relations with the US Central Command, as well as the other news organizations that covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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Al Jazeera is one of my favorite media outlets (I'm proud to call two of it's reporters my friends). Al Jazeera is not the "mouthpiece of radical Islam" as many in the Bush administration have labeled it. It is fair (for the most part) in it's reporting of events in the Middle East. Of course, there is the occasional bias, but it's no more than the amount of bias contained in American and British reporting.

From Wiki: "Al Jazeera (Arabic: الجزيرة‎) , meaning "The Island" and/or "The Peninsula" is an Arabic-language television channel based in Doha, Qatar. Its willingness to broadcast dissenting views, including on call-in shows, created controversies in the autocratic Persian Gulf Arab States. The station gained worldwide attention following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when it broadcast video statements by Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders...Al Jazeera claims to be the only politically independent television station in the Middle East. It now rivals the BBC in worldwide audiences with an estimated 50 million viewers...It is widely believed internationally that inhabitants of the Arab world are given limited information by their governments and media, and that what is conveyed is biased towards the governments' views. Many people see Al Jazeera as a more trustworthy source of information than government and foreign channels. Some scholars and commentators use the notion of contextual objectivity, which highlights the tension between objectivity and audience appeal, to describe the station's controversial yet popular news approach. As a result, it is probably the most watched news channel in the Middle East.

Increasingly, Al Jazeera's exclusive interviews and other footage are being rebroadcast in American, British, and other western media outlets such as CNN and the BBC. In January 2003, the BBC announced that it had signed an agreement with Al Jazeera for sharing facilities and information, including news footage." Read more at Wikipedia.

There's a great documentary called Control Room (2004). It is about Al Jazeera and its relations with the US Central Command, as well as the other news organizations that covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Made by Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, the film was distributed by Magnolia Pictures and can be found in most major video rental shops in large cities throughout Europe and North America.

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