Al Jezeera Who Woulda Thunk It

Ever since Al Jezeera began television service in the Middle East it has been vilified and generally discredited by many in this country. It has been called a propaganda tool of the extremists in the Middle East. However it has been Al Jezeera that has been broadcasting most of the important information that has been coming out of the Mid-East

It’s not that our own media hasn’t been good on reporting; they just haven’t been there. The reporters and cameramen that work for Al Jezeera have demonstrated courage and determination in tracking down the stories have been coming out of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and now Libya. Our Knee-jerk reaction to Al Jezeera when it first started to report was that anything that was said was slanted to the radical elements in the region. Sometimes Al Jezeera reported events that were not favorable to America, but later on we learned that they printed the truth. The truth isn’t always pleasant, but it may be exactly what we must hear.

America has cut back on its news gathering assets dramatically. It is costly and does not bring in the revenues that an episode of “Survivor” may bring in, and so news programs were scrapped. The likes of Edward R. Morrow, Walther Cronkite and Daniel Schorr were giants in the field of broadcast journalism. These individuals operated with large budgets, but at that time the networks thought that reporting important news was worth the effort.

Today, I think that AlJezeera understands the importance of the news mission as well as our own pioneers in the field. The paucity of access Americans have to that news link is appalling. There are two cities in the US where you can access AlJezeera directly. They are Burlington Vermont and a small city in Iowa. We get to see excerpts from AlJezeera news footage every day, because it turns out that it has the widest credible reporting in the Middle East. I for one am thankful they exist.