Al Jazeera is producing some of the finest global news coverage in the world today. I became a regular viewer recently so I could keep up on political debates with my family based in South Africa who have AJ on satellite.
Watching AJ reminds me how human-interest and emotion-centric the local news has become. The Egyptian coverage on CNN is nauseating. Yesterday a caller phoned in from Cairo and was falling over his words just spilling massive amounts of useful data and the anchor woman interrupts him to ask him about his feelings.
This starts off well but then he damns them with faint praise. What is wrong with thinking the weak are right because they are weak? It is far better than everyone else's heuristic that might right. And if covering the viewpoints of those who have no power is AlJazeera's "despotism" then its employees should feel nothing but pride.
Yesterday a caller phoned in from Cairo and was falling over his words just spilling massive amounts of useful data and the anchor woman interrupts him to ask him about his feelings
What's nauseating is knowing they broadcast that because they show what people want to see.
It's not on snopes yet, but it seems unlikely that Fox's cartographers would be that incompetent (especially since they probably buy their map imagery from a third party); this is most likely a photoshop job. And while it's amusing, I'd rather stick to disliking Fox and News Corp. for their blatant partisanship and pandering than feeling superior to them over something that's entirely fiction.
> It's not on snopes yet, but it seems unlikely that Fox's cartographers would be that incompetent (especially since they probably buy their map imagery from a third party)
Not really. There have been a number of instances of that from US domestic news services in the last ~10 years (Czech Republic labelled as Switzerland, Spain labelled as France, …).
No, it's because they were given a huge budget and told to spend it to hire and resource the best journalists. This started with the exodus of Arab journalists from the BBC world service, who downsized (Blair should have severely regretted this for what it unleashed in factual reporting on his fantasy dossiers) and continued with a deliberate attempt to hire the troublemakers from around the world - real journalists who cared about injustice rather than ratings.
The disregard for ratings is of course possible because they are funded by an oil rich dictator. He is not benign - no such dictator exist - but if the only good thing he ever did was create AlJazeera, then I would still be forever grateful.
Of course, in the true spirit of Make Something People Want, the disregard for simple ratings is what is causing AJ's growth in viewers around the world. A good chunk of people want real news, and these were the same people who propelled CNN to dominance, back when they had invested in news.
I'm guessing you haven't argued with very many feminists. Thatcher isn't exactly a feminist icon (WP: "Many British feminists regarded her as "an enemy".") and a lot of feminists I've encountered consider rationalism and emotional reserve to be artifacts of patriarchal oppression. adscft is overstating the case, perhaps, but his point isn't entirely baseless (and your response is quite the non-sequitur).
Had feminism not prevailed in the West, the West would be a male-dominated society, and things like the news would be controlled exclusively by men. Additionally, men would have continued to abide by traditional gender roles (which would have not been questioned or undergone change[1]), and the traditional male gender role is less overtly emotional. Hence, the news would be less overtly emotional.
That's a perfectly reasonable and straightforward argument which raises eyebrows only because it hints at the idea that feminism had some negative effects.
The comparison to Al-Jazeera might not be sound, however--masculine emotional reserve is a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Northern European culture, not necessarily Arabic culture.
[1] Feminism, as a natural consequence of advancing the position of women in society, questions gender roles by necessity. This is what makes the reference to Thatcher so inept--Thatcher advanced in a male-dominated profession by following a masculine gender role; Thatcher's Britain was willing to accept a woman PM, but only so long as she governed like a man. This is a far cry from what feminists would like to see.
In a male-dominated society, the news is still controlled not by men or women but by money, in the form of advertising revenue.
In a male-dominated society women are stay at home housewives, with time to flip through the channels and shop for household goods, making them a very important consumer demographic and a prime target for advertisers.
Therefore, television news would be 'emotional' and targeted to women.
I don't see how my argument is any less baseless conjecture than yours.
That's a decent argument, but my point isn't that feminism did lead to emotional news reporting, it's that the idea is something reasonable people might believe.
Plus, your counterargument is still pretty flawed--under traditional gender roles, most news is of no interest to women, and wouldn't be targeted to them, which is why news was traditionally aired during evenings, and nights when men were home, while soap operas and talk shows were aired during the day when housewives were home alone. (Come to think of it, your local network affiliate schedule still looks a lot like that.)
I don't know much about feminism as an intellectual movement, but there are definitely a lot casual feminists who consider Silicon Valley style entrepreneurship to be discriminatory because it requires reading non-fiction books in order to be successful.
The basic argument, if I undertand it correctly, is that women should be able to achieve success in any given field by doing things that women are stereotypically interested in. So, for example, they would consider Silicon Valley to be patriarchal because there isn't any role for women who only read People and US Weekly.
I know someone will accuse me of being sexist, but this was actually the consensus from the Women and Entrepreneurship class I took in college, albeit it wasn't phrased in exactly this way.
A straw man is a type of logical fallacy. I'm not making any argument; rather, I'm merely reporting a (possibly flawed) observation, so I don't really see how logical fallacies are relevant.
One tends to hear mention of logical fallacies in any intellectually-focused forum, not only HN. HN happens to be intellectually-focused, so the straw man and other fallacies will see frequent mention here.
However, this is unrelated to the grandparent comment, which was (perhaps facetiously) primarily discussing feminism and political correctness, not logical fallacies.
"The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us". Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things."
Excuse me while I die laughing. I haven't read that in a while. There is the inkling of a valid point there, but it's all thrown away by shit like describing PM as a 'rape manual.'
Just remember: these people are not representative of modern feminist thought!
EDIT: oh shit i forgot about this paragraph:
"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."
How exactly do you define feminists? If you define feminists as a few hundred radicals who work in universities, you'll get one answer, but if you define feminists as the few hundred million people who believe that woman should have the same legal and social rights and privileges as men, you'll get a very different answer.
I mean, my wife and mother are both feminists. And they both have (or are getting) graduate degrees in electrical engineering. And they're both masters of "rationalism and emotional reserve" -- so in a very glaring way, your argument here contradicts my experience.
As the vast majority of news networks have been scaling back "expensive" forms of journalism like having dedicated foreign bureaus, Al Jazeera has been one of the precious few news agencies that has been rapidly expanding it's foreign bureaus. The move is really starting to pay off for them.
In an increasingly globalized economy where we need much better coverage of international events, US news networks are going to find themselves scooped and out reported by Al Jazeera again and again. It's an impressive news agency, and to think, we bombed their offices twice in the last 10 years by accident[1].
Anyone wanting greater understanding of the regional dynamics in the Middle East should read al Jazeera regularly, just like anyone wanting to really understand local politics should read their local newspaper for a year, instead of reading an NYTimes article about their local politics. Watching it when there is a crisis really doesn't help understand, it just helps give you more information.
Similar to how a pipe fitter in West Texas reading HN once a month wouldn't really help them understand the culture that exists in the Y!Combinator/startup world, watching AJ when there is a crisis without watching it regularly leads you to impose your own cultural lens on the issues. I lived in a Central Asian country for three years, and it took me about two years to really understand how much I didn't understand the local culture.
Does anyone know if cable carriers in the US don't carry AJ because of lack of demand or is there documented evidence of active exclusion for business or political reasons?
Please don't take this question as conspiracy theory flame bait. I'm just curious about what is known about this.
Let me put it this way- If I were running a cable company, and I had to make a pure business decision on whether to carry AJE, I wouldn't do it. People were up in arms over a "mosque" several blocks away the WTC site...People were outraged at our President's middle name. there would be a HUGE uproar if cable operators started broadcasting "muslim propaganda" in our homes. I'm talking mass boycotts.
If we had a la carte cable, they'd offer what they seriously thought people would specifically seek out and buy. FOX News is a shoo-in, but PBS and Al Jazeera would be much riskier bets.
If that's the case, then why don't they do that now? Carrying less channels would reduce costs, while raising the price would increase profit. One would think that we wouldn't have to force them to move in that direction it what you say is true.
When the cable industry itself says that that's going to happen, I tend to believe that they will make it happen.[1]
"# Forcing cable operators to sell each channel separately (a la carte) would reduce the size of the potential audience for each channel, adversely affecting a network’s ability to attract the same level of advertising dollars. Networks would also incur much higher marketing costs to persuade customers to purchase their programming. As networks lose the advertising revenues that make up the bulk of their programming and operating budgets and face higher marketing costs, they would need to increase the license fees paid by cable operators in order to continue to deliver high quality and diverse programming.
# These higher license fees would be reflected in higher retail cable prices. To the extent that customers were unwilling to pay the higher a la carte prices for certain networks, those networks would have no choice but to reduce the quality and attractiveness of their programming or go out of business."
Also:
"Mandatory a la carte could cause the demise of many existing basic programming services and hinder the creation of new ones, reducing choice and diversity."
I don't usually parrot industry group talking points. However, in this case, we're debating about what the cable industry would do if a la carte were forced on them, and I think they've already answered that question.
The fact that it's owned by the Qatari government probably wouldn't help things either. Not only is it Middle Eastern, but it's controlled by a foreign government.
The section "Turning On" describes the process that led Buckeye Cable System in Ohio to start carrying Al Jazeera. I think it directly addresses your question.
Even if All Jazeera is seeing a huge traffic spike, it's still only a small percentage of Americans who are trying to seek out real news. The vast majority of Americans don't even want an uncensored media.
I believed they were sucking up to the Qatari regime until late 2009 when they nearly caused themselves to be de-funded after exposing that 20% of the country's oil exports were unaccounted for.
They are censored, by a tiny emirate which I don't care about, and even then they test limits of their own sandbox there. It's not like Qatar has a huge global influence and alliances it must watch over. And their own self-censorship regarding Qatar is one of omission, rather than, say, creative reporting.
Al-Jazeera is good for us because it holds the four major forces in the region accountable and on their toes: the regimes, Israel & America, Iran, and Saudi Arabia and its Jihadi minions.
Al-Jazeera angered everyone when it broadcast a program calling the Arabic language obselete and said university students should be taught in English to compete in the global economy. Stuff like that doesn't buy you a lot of friends.
I subscribe to al-Jazeera and listen to their podcasts. If you speak Arabic, here are the "Op-Ed" episodes (they're both transcribed, so paste into translator if you don't speak Arabic):
The realities of the Arabic Language
واقع اللغة العربية
P.S. If you're interested in tracking al-Jazeera and mideast media in general, I can scrape program titles and headline from the last 5 years and run that through a translation API. It's very prophetic of Al Jazeera to broadcast a program titled "Why don't the Arab masses rise up and revolt against the regimes" less than 2 months ago.
A tiny emirate who's leaders just managed to acquire the world's biggest sporting event, and are trying to buy one of Europe's best known football teams.
My point being, writing off any news bias as irrelevant as Qatari politics has no influence on the world stage is ridiculous as Qatar are moving towards centre stage.
It's not even the fact that Ron Paul was essentially just deleted from existence by every mainstream American news outlet. Remember, this was the period when McCain went from 2% support to winning the Republican primary in about a month after CNN, Fox, and the NYT teamed up to swing the electorate.
They basically figured out that they were only going to get paid for this cycle if there was a Republican candidate who actually had a shot at winning, so they buried all of McCain's opponents and completely censored the entire grassroots movement.
I'll take NPR. I've been a dedicated NPR listener for a long time. Even after leaving the US I listened to it online nearly every day. Over the last week, Al Jazeera's (English) coverage has been shockingly better than NPR's. Some of this, of course, is that world events right now happen to be on their turf. But I think most of it is that NPR's reporters and pundits are locked in a narrow and obsolete spectrum of thinking. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I'll be continuing to follow AJ, at least intermittently, from now on. I know greater openness when I see it; going back to NPR makes me feel claustrophobic now.
(One underappreciated thing nobody has over NPR News, though, is Robert Siegel. God I love that man's voice, and his English. I'd happily listen to him interview the phone book. The phone book wouldn't say anything, but Siegel's questions would be exquisite.)
NPR does a great job at talking about stuff that's already in the news, but they aren't really a news service.
BBC has reasonably good coverage of American politics, but it's not written for Americans so there's a lot of cognitive overhead. Because of this it doesn't really make sense to read it like a newspaper, though their take on specific issues is often good, albeit brief. Many of their article are barely more than headlines.
And PBS is decent, but it's mainly targeted at people 60+ and retired. Waiting until 7pm for news from last week just isn't viable for people who actually need to know what's going on.
> And PBS is decent, but it's mainly targeted at people 60+ and retired. Waiting until 7pm for news from last week just isn't viable for people who actually need to know what's going on.
I'm sorry that's just ridiculous. Not only do they have a website that's constantly updated, the news they present is timely according to the importance of the event. They usually have a mix of a) news that happened that day, b) follow up stories from events from the past few days or week and c) long term international news (Haitian recovery, Peru's economy, etc.). And then they have ~5-7 minute rundown of the headlines from that day. Recently they've been devoting almost the entire program to Egypt.
I seriously cannot understand HN's infatuation with Al Jazeera English. It's simply a more sophisticated version of CNN or BBC. I guess if you're looking for a 24 hour news, then yeah, go with Al Jazeera English. I've watched it for their live coverage of Egypt, but I can't imagine watching AJE every day.
Uncensored - yes just as Fox News or CNN or the BBC is uncensored.
But all practice some degree self-censoring, where they. for example, beep out language deemed offensive
More importantly all have some degree of bias. (Let's not get into the discussion of who is and more or less biased and in which direction.)
The only true way to get the news these days is to watch from different viewpoints and form your own opinion. That's all Al Jazerra is asking for. They are also offering coverage of news that is otherwise unavailable - isn't that a good thing?
I have no bias against them other than the fact that they seemed a pulpit for AQ, but even then I'd rather have something than nothing.
I don't watch Fox, MSNBC, or the rest unless I have to, so it's not an issue of who's better or the least biased as much as it is who will waste my time least.
To claim that someone is a mouthpiece for a terrorist organization is a pretty serious claim. You cannot seriously claim this and then just leave it without substantiation.
Provided a pulpit or were used as a pulpit? The post is poorly worded I agree but there's a difference; if I as a hypothetical editor went searching for such people as regular op-ed voices I think that would be unethical, but is it the same to broadcast their latest threatening diatribe when sent it? Al Jazeera seem to be the largest regional news source by some margin so it's logical for someone wanting to spread a message to send it via them and it's equally logical (to me) for them to report that the threatening message has been sent.
eftpotrm below has it right - I'd argue that they provided a platform for the release of Bin Laden's videos, and as I said above, I'd rather have the videos than not, so I don't fault them for doing it. I just get concerned any time an organization gets too close to their source.
I thought this interview was a good look into their policy and goings-on:
Maybe Al Jazeera should just run with being a 21st century, Internet delivered news channel.
they are! I haven't seen any news network that has such high priority for having live feed on the internets. they literally have their live feed at almost every internet video delivery provider - youtube, real media, livestation, you name it...
I am not watching Al Jazeera because of their underlying ideology, but because they are doing the best reporting on Egypt. If they were to continue to provide such powerful reporting on other topics I would watch them for that as well.
I think their good reporting is a result of their underlying ideology, which they explained in this article:
"Through investigative and on-site journalism, our ultimate goal is to bring greater awareness, painting a more complete picture of the Middle East's realities. Armed with more information, we believe the people of this region and further afield can make better choices to guide their lives - hopefully ones that will lead to a more peaceful and democratic future, regardless of where they live."
Um, I think their "underlying ideology" is doing the best reporting on Egypt, and everything else they cover.
These are seriously hardcore journalists with a very global perspective. I suspect they're currently being flooded with resumes from disgruntled / disgusted / dismayed reporters at CNN, MSNBC, and even FOX - all of whom would give up their first-born to get back into real reporting, instead of the dreadful corporate infotainment that's busy getting relegated to the sphere of complete irrelevance and risible self-parody.
Watching AJ reminds me how human-interest and emotion-centric the local news has become. The Egyptian coverage on CNN is nauseating. Yesterday a caller phoned in from Cairo and was falling over his words just spilling massive amounts of useful data and the anchor woman interrupts him to ask him about his feelings.