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The Arab world’s ‘CNN’: TV REVIEW COVERAGE of events and developments related to the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington has brought to world attention an otherwise not-so-well-known Arabic channel, Qatar-based Al-Jazeerah Television. The ‘not-so-well-known’ qualification is a relative one because Jazeerah has been around for quite some time but because it telecasts programmes in Arabic, it has not had such a wide audience as, say, CNN or BBC. However, the way it has handled coverage of the post-Sept 11 events, especially of what’s going on inside Afghanistan, has led many to call it the Arab and the Muslim world’s CNN. Being compared to CNN isn’t necessarily a good thing in itself because the channel is quite biased but probably the comparison has been made because Al-Jazeerah’s coverage has been quite comprehensive and thorough. Nothing really has been left out as such. In fact, it is perhaps the only independent news channel that has considerable access inside Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan. For example, it managed to show footage of a meeting of the country’s senior clerics who a couple of weeks ago were asked to convene by supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and decide Osama bin Laden’s future. Such access has led many, especially people and competition in America and Europe, to accuse Al-Jazeerah of being pro-Taliban or being biased in favour of the Muslims and against the Americans. In fact, the Amir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, was asked precisely this question by reporters after meeting US secretary of state Colin Powell and, in fact, US officials even suggested that Doha use its clout to influence the editorial policy of the channel. He was quick to say that his country would do no such thing since it was on its way to becoming a parliamentary democracy where freedom of expression, as in Western democracies, had to be secured. First of all, just because a channel has access to a power or news centre does not mean that its editorial policy will be biased in favour of that entity. In fact, going by the same reasoning this would mean that CNN should be very biased in favour of American policy and the BBC should be aligned with the British policies (both channels though are sometimes accused of doing just this). The other point that needs to be made is that to say that a newspaper, or a radio station or a news channel has no bias whatsoever is nonsense. Everybody has biases. In fact, it would make no sense if we didn’t because after all editorial policies of media organizations are made by people who would all be very dull and boring if they didn’t have opinions and personal inclinations. And then there are corporate interests, which are probably the most pronounced in the case of American media organizations, for example CNN is owned by AOL-Time Warner, in which various major US corporations have a controlling interest. It’s actually more than a bit ironic that American journalists and officials should be suggesting that a government place restrictions on a television news channel. One wouldn’t even think of a reporter or a columnist of, say, the venerable New York Times suggesting that the US Department of State try to influence CNN or Fox News. The implication is clear in this, in fact its downright racist because the subtle suggestion is that Al-Jazeerah is an irresponsible news organization that needs to be controlled by a government. The irony also is that while American journalists are quick to see (perceived) bias in the case of other channels, they never see the bias that goes on in their own organizations, or in media entities that share a similar cultural background, like the BBC for example. For instance, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a dynamic leader and a very good speaker. He spoke with apparent compassion at the annual conference of his Labour Party in Bristol this week and spoke of the horrors people travelling on the two planes, as they were about to ram the World Trade Centre towers, must have faced, knowing that they were about to die. Well, why does no one on CNN or BBC ever bring up the issue of how the thousands of Iraqi mothers must have felt as they saw their babies die before their very eyes, all because an obstinate America refused to relax crippling sanctions. And talking about bias, why not look into Zee TV. How, without even getting any solid confirmation, it started airing suggestions that the ‘hijackers’ of the Indian plane wanted to go to Lahore or Karachi, and how they seemed to be speaking bad English — the suggestion obviously being that they were Arab. In fact, CNN’s Satinder Bindra, who is as biased as they come, went even a step further, saying the hijackers appeared to be speaking Urdu. Such insinuation end up giving a bad name primarily to the channel, especially in this case because Mr Bindra would surely know that spoken Urdu and Hindi can be quite similar. In any case, as it turns out the official version is that there were no hijackers on board. —Omar R. Quraishi Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
