PressEthic

Recently, I watched a documentary titled Control Room, directed by Jehane Noujaim. It is about Al-jazareera TV's coverage and exposure of the American led war on Iraq, weeks before the war starts until the regime falls.

The documentary, which is an excellent piece of work, confers with Al-jazeera's staff working in their control room before and during the war. It gives an affluent account of Al-Jazeera staff’s personal reaction towards the war on Iraq, in conjunction with other angles of the war's media coverage.

Listening to what the staff members said, one realizes they, as media personnel, have an ideological media agenda through which they intend to exhibit their beliefs in the partial editorial strategy of Al-jazeera's news and its bias against the American interference or presence in Middle East and the Arab world.

This fact reminded me of the time when one of the channel’s prominent female newsreaders called Khadeeja Bin Qina veiled. She is totally free she decided to wear a headscarf, but the way she showed her pride,at that time, for covering her head was a little hint that elucidated some sort of embodiment of the channel's ideological mentality.

Undoubtedly, Al-jazeera has new and advanced technological equipment and a wide spread coverage with good skills among their staff. However, the question is that, how are these skills used? How are they directed? After watching the documentary, although I had my personal notes on al-jazeera years before watching it, I immediately visualized that the well-developed news channel, with all its technological abilities resembles a political party. I understood it is an ideological organization, which conveys a certain message to a certain group of people.

Listening to their staff's opinion, I imagined how their recruitment regimes would be for employing staff, from reporters to senior producers. They may have certain selection criteria that not only requires media skills, background and expertise but also requires how the candidate should think, what his/her stand is mainly towards western policy in general and American policy in particular in the Arab world and towards what is called "resistance" against the western power.

The documentary introduced me to Al-jazeera's staff, their mentality and even their behavior. I have concluded that this staff is brought up to be used to reporting one side of events. In their news stories, they only include the aspects that meet the channel's agenda. For example, Al-jazeera has never reported the atrocities and human rights violations practiced by most of the Arab regimes. However, on the contrary, it covers the Isreal-Palstine conflict and vilolence in Iraq very well legitimizing suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq and they call it "resistance", no matter how many civilians are killed.

If their justification is that the Arab governments do not allow them cover and do their job as appropriate as they want, they can convey that fact as well for their audience if they believe in a fair and impartial media. Media is not established to a play a role in a conflict or to decide who is right and who is wrong on behalf of the audience. Audience are the first and last decision makers for journalists

In another scene of the documentary, none of their staff believed that Saddam Hussein and his regime were overthrown when the American soldiers entered Baghdad. Moreover, even one of the Channel’s senior producers said that those Iraqis who celebrated Saddam's ouster are not Iraqis. As a person, you can express with your opinion to be against the American led war, but you cannot deny the fall of Saddam as journalist. True media personnel should tell the news the way it is.

What we see from Al-Jazeera staff makes us ask: Are these the skilled staff of a wide spread broadcast news channel? Media's role shouldn't be directed aginst someone, a party or a nation. As far as I know media' role should be a real impartial camera to convey what goes on on the ground, not deceiving audience.

I know that Al-jazeera TV is not the only news broadcast channel that has an agenda, but for sure is a typical one. Besides, if it aims at "awakening the Arabic societies" to stand against the western governments as one of thier senior producers said in the documentary, it is their duty to awaken themselves first to get rid of the reactive mentality, which is not the objective of media and which shows they are again the outcome of the closed-minded media that has lived under the Arab world dictators for decaded.