>Another thing I don't understand: I don't understand how a network
>[Al-Jazeera] that reported that Jews were told beforehand not to go
>to work in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 gets classified as a
>"serious news outlet." What, then, could possibly be an unserious
>news outlet?
Here's what Edward Said said in a recent interview. ("TO" is The Texas Observer, in the person of Debbie Nathan.)
TO: What did you think of Fouad Ajami's New York Times Magazine article in November about Al-Jazeera's being extremely biased, and a danger to the United States? ES: It was preposterous. Ajami-who I should tell you is an ideological opponent of mine-was extremely shoddy and I thought hysterical in his presentation. His conclusion that Al-Jazeera is anti-America was simply wrong. I watch Al-Jazeera. There is a very large range of opinion, some of it pro-American, some of it anti-American. The announcers present the news as it occurs in the Arab world, obviously differently from the way the Israelis and the Americans present the news, but why shouldn't that have a status of its own? Why should just one version be the accepted version? And certainly it's a much freer, more diverse range of discussion than in any American media. For instance, you've got much wider coverage than normally available here of what was taking place in Afghanistan before the American invasion or bombing began. Al-Jazeera had three or four people inside Afghanistan, one of whom was a casualty of the American bombing of their main office in Kabul. And [on news programs dealing with Palestine] they regularly put on Israeli spokesmen, many of them very fluent in Arabic. They'll not only have Hanan Ashrawi [a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and the Arab League's Arab Media General Commissioner] and the head of some institution in Gaza and some spokesman for Arafat, but they'll bring someone from the [Israeli] foreign ministry, somebody from the Army, to talk about what the Israelis think they're doing, and they're given quite a bit of time.
http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleFileName=020215_b1.htm