Control Room

Introduction

Control Room unfastens with diagrams of poverty in the Arab world, the now-familiar cluster of offspring clutching their mother right away under her hijab. The terminal clip of unclasping credits, though, is a strikingly poetic photograph of what al-Jazeera perceives as its task statement: A homemade satellite cobbled concurrently from drift wire rope and a rusty colander, cultivated in the upturned tangible of the Arab Street. Cut to an Arab coffee shop, the sort you could find on Main Street USA, with a room full of appalled local inhabitants monitoring Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on March 17, 2003. Cut to the al-Jazeera goods produced studios, where a reporter advises us, "Al-Jazeera's job is to train the Arab population on democracy...to woken from snooze them." According to Control Room, al-Jazeera is basically suggesting an other pick viewpoint to its quintessence audience. Why should America and British mega-corps be the world's only source of news?

Al-Jazeera draws close to this resolution supported on a two-steps-removed bond to Fox News. Fox's "We Report, You Decide" motto is, to every one monitoring critically, a cynical slogan. Fox's listeners have now resolved how it feels, so the "news" is basically reconfirming these entrenched viewpoints. That's not journalism--the cart is before the horse. Fox's guards commonly dispute that the "conservative" viewpoint is basically "balancing" the viewpoint of the "liberal media." Yet, it's part of Bill O'Reilly's shtick that he's the tough-minded unconnected on a web that allegations to be "fair and balanced", to the purpose of menacing to bring a claim The New York Times for citing to it as the "conservative journal channel." Its propaganda masquerading as journal supported by and ran by conservatives to rally its foundation and obfuscate real journal details in the legitimate media.

Control Room disputes that al-Jazeera, in the way the Fox attempts to "balance" the liberal broadcasting, is just "balancing" the pro-Western scenery with the viewpoint of the Arab Street--indeed, they move out "fair and balanced" out of their conversions of Fox News reports. By the end of Control Room, it's very clear that al-Jazeera has co-opted the Fox News template, and in performing so, the two have made unclear the line between journalism and propaganda. This is none new, neither a disagreement for the sanctity of the webs and broadsheets, but a renaissance of Yellow Journalism, fuelled by the immediacy of technical knowledge and items of money. In item, Control Room is a sly bit of propaganda itself, casting al-Jazeera as the guiltless sufferer of the Bush Administration's deceit. Donald Rumsfeld declares all types of appalling things about al-Jazeera, perpetually shown on a video screen looking down on us, intoning assertions like "Al-Jazeera is the mouthpiece of Osama garbage bin Ladin"--as if he (Rumsfeld) is Big Brother rallying in resistance to Goldstein.

 

Objectivity and Propaganda

The remarks “objectivity” and “propaganda” get tossed throughout many in Jehane Noujaim's documentary Control Room. Ostensibly a picture about the Arab TV web Al-Jahzera, Control Room works best as a succinct disagreement on how both those ...