Joe Bob's America: Al-Jazeera

NEW YORK, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- Did somebody yell "Dogpile on Al-Jazeera"?

I haven't seen this much whup-ass opened on a media outlet since The Progressive published its recipe for the H-bomb. But this time it's not only the government high sheriffs that hate 'em -- we kinda expect that -- or the military honchos -- we KNOW they don't like reporters -- but the OTHER networks.

I could quote from a long list of hysterical hissy fits on Al-Jazeera by working-stiff journalists, but the stunner came from Dan Rather himself. He actually questioned whether there was "any indication that Osama bin Laden has helped finance this operation."

Well ... uh ... NO, Dan. There is no indication of that. Al-Jazeera is owned by the emir of Qatar and several private investors, but Osama is not one of them. There is so little indication of that that the al Qaida press officer has been known to regularly bitch out Al-Jazeera for throwing his news releases and faxes into the trash.

If you wanna get some idea of what all the belly-aching is about, take the R train over to Pacific Street in Brooklyn, right around where it meets Flatbush Avenue, and go into one of the Arab restaurants where they have an Al-Jazeera TV hookup. I don't speak a syllable of Arabic, but even these jaded eyes are entertained by it. It's lively, graphic, and its cameras are everywhere. They're showing bombed-out buildings, incinerated pick-up trucks, wounded children, LOTS of close up footage of angry Palestinians -- in other words, they're zeroing in on the CONFLICT. There's a lot of actual YELLING on their talk shows. They're the New York Post of Arab TV.

I was about to say that they're the Fox News Channel of Arab TV, but if you keep your set on Fox News all day, what you're likely to see is ... news conferences! Al-Jazeera covers the American news conferences, too, but they don't DWELL ON IT like the American news channels do.

Al-Jazeera is LITERALLY down in the trenches and caves. MSNBC, on the other hand, interrupted a live breaking story -- that mad gunman in Elkhart -- to cut to a Bush news conference announcing the new director of the National Cancer Institute! I'm all for fighting cancer, but sometimes you think our own domestic news channels have turned into flack-chasing wimps. Right now they'd cover a 7-Eleven opening in Saginaw, as long as a Deputy Undersecretary of State showed up. I can remember Clinton news conferences that were only covered by one network: C-SPAN!

So what's going on here REALLY? Why wouldn't the international media be behind these guys? Al-Jazeera has cameras in the streets -- not on rocky ridges with vague shapes moving around in the distance. They're in ALL the war zones. They're obviously putting it on the line. And yet we have Colin Powell making an actual diplomatic complaint to the emir of Qatar, asking him to "tone down the rhetoric" on Al-Jazeera. Can you imagine if the emir of Qatar asked Bush to "muzzle those obnoxious chicks on 'All Things Considered'"? I don't think so.

Here are just a FEW of the Jazeera Jeers going around: Numero Uno: "Al-Jazeera is just a puppet mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden."

Nobody said this until Oct. 7, the day Al-Jazeera broadcast the first Osama Bin Laden tape, the one where he calls on Muslims to celebrate the Sept. 11 attacks. The tape had been delivered by messenger to the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul.

What were they supposed to do with the tape? Erase it? Any decent reporter would have sold his soul for that tape.

I know for a fact that every news agency and network was doing everything humanly possible to get an interview with bin Laden. United Press International had an up-close-and-personal interview with Mullah Mohammed Omar, but as far as I know we weren't attacked as lackeys for the Taliban.

The fact is, Al-Jazeera just out-hustled everybody. The other networks were peeved because Al-Jazeera was the only foreign network that had been licensed to operate in Afghanistan, implying that they were an arm of the Taliban. The reason for that is simple. They got their license in 1998! They were the only network that had been covering the Afghani conflict EVERY DAY for the last three years. They were, in other words, the big dog in town.

The sad truth of the matter is that the American networks, unlike Al-Jazeera, have been shutting down their foreign bureaus for the last 20 years under pressure from advertisers and in response to focus groups that show that people only want domestic news. You're not gonna win the lottery if you stop buying tickets.

Numero Two-o: Al-Jazeera slants the news to be pro-Arab. Well, DUH. The channel is for people who speak Arabic! Thirty-five million of 'em, including 150,000 in the United States. There was a big hoohaw about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the second "intifada," the rock-throwing children of Palestine, implying that the network was "fanning the flames of Muslim outrage." (That comes from The New York Times.)

More likely it was just ... a great story! (And where were the American cameras? Last time I checked, they were free to shoot all the rock-throwing children they want.)

There was also criticism of Al-Jazeera for using the word "martyr" in its reporting on dead Palestinian civilians.

I'm looking at the front pages of Friday's New York papers. One has a giant picture of Sgt. Jefferson Donald Davis, with an American flag behind him, and the headline "THEY DIED FOR OUR FLAG." The other says "BOMBS ASTRAY" and also memorializes the dead American soldiers. And ALL the papers have been writing stories about each and every victim of the World Trade Center bombings for weeks. They use words like "hero," but it's exactly the same thing, and there's nothing wrong with it. They have heroes and martyrs, too.

Numero Three-o: Al-Jazeera is soft on Qatar, never criticizing their own country, and especially keeping hands off the ruling al-Thani family.

I'll give you one American example of the same thing. Bloomberg News Service. They're not going to cover New York City Hall during the reign of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who owns Bloomberg News Service. (Officially they say they'll cover him, but the staff says it's going to be softball.) This is sort of INEVITABLE. It's not any vast conspiracy.

The point that should be made is that Qatar is a perfect headquarters for Al-Jazeera, because a) nobody CARES about Qatar, and b) the place is so incredibly wealthy that it's free of outside influence. They don't have to beg for assistance from any other Arab state. And that's why Al-Jazeera has been condemned, threatened, cajoled and harassed by the governments of Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Israel, Libya, Tunisia -- and, yes, Yasser Arafat's PLO.

When Colin Powell made his formal complaint to the emir, the emir gave him a little lecture about "a free and credible media." They're free and credible because they don't have to kowtow to anyone.

Numero Four-o: Al-Jazeera runs irresponsible talk shows that give credibility to extreme Islamic fundamentalist wackos.

Apparently Al-Jazeera loves the wild-eyed bearded mullah who will come on the air and talk about jihad. After reading some of the accounts of these interviews, I'm wondering, "Why don't WE get to see these guys?" Surely we could work it out with some simultaneous translation. But isn't the whole theory of American talk radio to put borderline wackos on the air and then let the people rage back and forth about them? All Al-Jazeera has done is take the Jerry Springer principle and convert it into political terms.

Numero Five-o: Al-Jazeera's constant video of wounded civilians, destroyed buildings and violent anti-American demonstrations is telling the story from the Taliban's point of view.

I'm sure Al-Jazeera would be happy to photograph wounded civilians and destroyed buildings in America. They have bureaus here. And, in fact, they've photographed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as much as anyone else. They were criticized, to give one example, for showing an especially frenzied demonstration in Rawalpindi during which a cardboard photo of George Bush was spit on, pounded with shoes, and stomped into pulp. But I remember around the same time a report on CNN showing Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman bashing an effigy of Osama bin Laden with a baseball bat. In both cases, I think the media motive was the same: GREAT VIDEOTAPE.

Numero Six-o: By concentrating on minute-by-minute battlefield coverage, Al-Jazeera doesn't show the American side at all.

The reason we don't see the American side of the battlefield is that the Pentagon, with very narrow exceptions, doesn't allow anyone to go there. There is no video footage of the prison riot in Mazar-i-Sharif -- only the aftermath. There is no video footage of the siege of Konduz -- only the aftermath. There is no video footage of the burning of the American Embassy -- UNLESS you watch Al-Jazeera, because they were there.

At the end of the Persian Gulf War, Powell was forced to confront an angry press corps who felt that, by and large, they had been shut out of the action -- and he promised that, in the "next war," they would be given access to the battlefield. Am I the only one who remembers this?

Oddly enough, after the initial outrage at Al-Jazeera, the administration abruptly changed direction in late October and decided to start giving interviews to them. Up until that time, Al-Jazeera had begged and pleaded but been denied access to top American spokesmen. Since then Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld have all appeared on Al-Jazeera. (A little late, though. It would have made more sense to go on there the week of Sept. 11.)

During his Al-Jazeera interview General Myers was asked the question, don't you try to control what the media sees, just like the Taliban does? Here's his answer:

"Well, I'd say no. We're not in the propaganda business. And as you know well, at least in this country, our media have good noses for that. You have many checks and balances. We don't have a propaganda machine. We have the U.S. media. They're free to go and travel where they want. We have facilitated them going to some of our military operations to talk to our people. They have some people inside Afghanistan and are reporting from there."

And you wonder why Al-Jazeera is skeptical? To say the Pentagon is not touchy about media coverage is like saying Sally Field didn't care whether she won the Oscar or not.

During the Serbian conflict, an American flyer was shot down over the Balkans, and the American media coverage was HUGE, covering every step of his rescue and his return as a hero. If the U.S. media were truly non-partisan, wouldn't they also have covered the hero's welcome for the Serbian soldier who brought down an American fighter plane with a shoulder-mounted missile? Obviously it IS one-sided. They look at the war through the eyes of the American soldier. This is just the first war where the other side had its OWN TV network.

Numero Seven-o: Any media outlet that helps the Taliban get its message out should be considered part of the enemy's arsenal and eliminated.

This is the most serious one of all, and it's been advanced by a New York Daily News columnist as recently as Oct. 14. (The Post took the milder view, suggesting we just jam Al-Jazeera's broadcast signal.)

In fact, if the American media wanted to truly investigate this story, they would try to find out just why an American bomb fell on the offices of Al-Jazeera in Kabul on the very night that the Northern Alliance took over the city.

The timing is highly suspicious. We know that the American military was monitoring Al-Jazeera's phones and satellite transmissions. (The United States saw the second bin Laden tape seven days before it aired, which means they had to steal it off Al-Jazeera's uplink.)

We know that the editor of Al-Jazeera had ordered the staff to evacuate the city that night. Tayseer Alouni, the Syrian Spaniard who is Al-Jazeera's No. 1 reporter in Afghanistan, had first fled to the east, then managed to get word to the Northern Alliance that he wanted to stay. The Northern Alliance commander assured him he wouldn't be harmed, so he went back to his office. The bomb fell between the time the staff was evacuated and Alouni had reversed his decision.

The office is located in a residential area, so the bomb hit its intended target. U.S. Col. Rick Thomas even insisted that the building was "a known al Qaida facility in central Kabul" -- hard to believe, since Al-Jazeera had been there a long time, and they had given the precise location of the building to the American government through their friends at CNN.

But Al-Jazeera, with its newly gained access to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, didn't even bother to ask them about their OWN targeting. They asked a more serious question. Why did you bomb the national radio station that broadcasts to Afghanistan? Wouldn't that be considered a civilian target?

No, it wouldn't, answered Rumsfeld. It was part of the Taliban's infrastructure.

So would you consider Voice of America part of the United States' infrastructure, and a legitimate military target?

No, replied Rumsfeld, because Voice of America is "independent" and doesn't answer to the State Department. (Not entirely true.)

Would you then, asked the persistent Al-Jazeera interviewer, consider the Pentagon a military target? And Rumsfeld refused to answer the question.

Since we had already bombed a television network in Belgrade during the Serbian conflict, it was no surprise that the Pentagon includes the media in its planning. But this is the first time it had been so explicitly stated. America doesn't bomb media outlets -- unless they think they're getting to the population with the wrong message. It's a content-based bombing policy. There are crazy dangerous lunatics over there, with microphones and cameras in their hands.

--

(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebob-briggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.)