mediajunk

Continuing the trend it has set ever since it broadcasted tapes of Bin Laden after 9/11, the Arab-language news station Al-Jazeera is proving to be the most widely sought-after news station of the current war.

Not that the station is universally admired; it has received criticism from the US administration for being impartial. The station's Kabul office was bombed (accidentally, said officials) during the recent Afghanistan war.

Al-Jazeera has once again captured the attention of viewers in the west, by broadcasting gruesome pictures of the effects of the war in Iraq -- images, for example, of dead and mutilated bodies of soldiers (on both sides) and Iraqi civilians. While the interviews with captured American POWs were roundly criticized in the west for being contrary to the Geneva convention, other horrific images go unseen on western tv channels, presumably because of fears of the effects of such images on the "hearts and minds" of viewers.

So westerners have gone in search of the images via the internet. This week, Al-Jazeera launched an English version of its website, which immediately came under attack from hackers. Earlier in the week, web users searching for the site found themselves redirected to an image of the US flag. When this problem was rectified, the site was hit with a mischievous "denial of service" spike, which has slowed its performance. The live stream of its television broadcast has been similarly affected.

The rise of the station's popularity is nevertheless indicative of the shift in media politics that is accompanying the shakedown in national politics. It's worth remembering too that the BBC's reputation grew enormously during WW2, when many Germans tuned in to for a less partial source of news than that provided by the Gestapo.

It's perhaps not surprising, either, to learn that many of Al-Jazeera's leading journalists were trained at the BBC.

I don’t claim that Al-Jazeera is impartial. I don’t watch Al-Jazeera; but there's no such thing as impartial news. Still, it's certainly an alternative to the increasingly similar western bulletins (regardless of political leanings), where “embedded” journalists seem as eager to promote their own celebrity as to create news.

It’s worth asking ourselves, too, whether viewers are seeking out Al-Jazeera’s images in order to spice up their “consumption” of a war that has become, for those not caught up in it, armchair entertainment. In arabic cultures, pornography as “entertainment” is largely prohibited and taboo, while the “real” pornography of war is freely broadcast; the inverse seems to be true in western cultures.