With that in mind, I would read an AJ article, whereas I would pretty much ignore/dismiss anything from RT without giving it the benefit of reading it first. Maybe it’s latent(?) Russophobia (or just Putinphobia) on my part, or maybe it’s because someone on Facebook would link to an RT article to prove a (sometimes ridiculous) point.
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BUT - Qatar actually is fairly progressive for the region. At least according to some articles a read awhile ago. IIRC they are a mash of a monarchy with some democracy, and the king was pushing through things like letting women drive etc. I know some of their women commentators/reporters have taken flack from other regions for their audacity on TV. Sooo - I think that’s a good thing.
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It’s a shame, because you really need a big mix of news sources, so that you can see what each one chooses to emphasise and report, and work out the inevitable biases that way.
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Agreed although I can’t quite figure out their foreign policy. They were alleged to be supporting the Islamist rebels in Mali a few years ago, and I couldn’t figure out why, as that’s not how they practice Islam at home. (This was mentioned in a news article from the time, that of course I can no longer find, and I haven’t seen it suggested elsewhere.) I know a couple of years ago, they re-established relations with Ethiopia (allowing Qatar Airways to fly there among other things). I think they had fallen out over Qatari support for Eritrea. I’m just not sure what’s in it for Qatar.
Actually I am starting to think that KSA and Kuwait are the outliers in the region (i.e. Arabian peninsula), both being more strict than Bahrain, Oman, Qatar or (most of) the UAE (Sharjah’s the exception there). Of course KSA is bigger than all of them, probably even when they’re combined.
(ETA I’m not sure about Yemen.)
I used to watch Al Jazeera English on the internet, great source of international news. Then they blocked U.S. viewers to force them to watch Al Jazeera America on cable. Al Jazeera English is still blocked as of right now in the states. I hope it becomes available again. (http://video.aljazeera.com/channels/eng/live)
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Yeah, I think I had an app for that on my TV, and then it quit working (for the reason you mentioned). I have FiOS and can’t remember if they don’t have AJ America at all, or it just wasn’t in the package I bought. I think it’s the latter.
They did? Never had any trouble in this part o’ 'Murica.
Bingo. When the US wanted an organ of propaganda in Iraq, did they name it “America News”? No, they named it Al Hurra (“The Free One”). (It was hamhanded and had dubious results in the beginning, but at least they were trying.)
Whether or not, Al Jazeera was actually a Qatari organ of propaganda, it was sheer hubris to think a channel called “Al Jazeera” complete with an Arabic logo, and the dubious patrimony of its mothership, would fly in Murica.
At the very least they shouldve ditched the name/logo and rebranded it as something that didnt resonate as foreign to the US (even “AJA” would’ve been better).
Yes. Let’s eliminate all too muslimy sounding names. In fact, how about they just convert to Christianity and avoid this whole problem.
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Reasons to like AJAM:
- They had some fantastic feature writers and reporters. I am a total fanboy of E. Tammy Kim.
- Great coverage regarding race and social inequality in the United States.
- Excellent investigative team, like really excellent. Volatile region + Money = Lots of talented boots-on-the-ground journalists.
Reasons to dislike AJAM:
- Possibly anti-Semitic. Definitely more pro-Arab, but that’s to be expected because there is absolutely no such thing as objective journalism. I’ll explain this later.
- Possibly misogynistic. They’ve received several lawsuits from various women.
- Possibly shady. Some of the journalists are seeing if their grounds of dismissal can be contested by the respective journalist guilds/organizations they belong to.
I feel kind of split on the issue. As to whether they offered “objective journalism” or not, objective journalism doesn’t exist because objectivity is impossible. No matter what you write and how you write it, it will have repercussions that are ultimately influenced by human emotion.
For example, when the New York Times reported on the thousands of lynchings in the 1890s, they did so blandly with neutral language and no imagery. Instead of describing the mutilated bodies of the African American victims and the seething hatred of the crowds, they simply listed off names and events. This actually had the effect of normalizing these actions.
Another example is Japanese history textbooks in the public school curriculum. When the textbooks discusses war crimes at all, again, it is very blandly. Numbers of civilian deaths (skewed towards the bare minimum that historians agree upon of course), treaties, military engagements. There’s no pictures of Unit 731 performing their experiments on live subjects. There are no descriptions of how they removed vitals organs from civilians and patched them back up to see how long they’d survive, or the children who were set on fire for study, or the prisoners that were raped and purposefully infected with syphilis and gonorrhea.
The end effect is a Japanese population that is largely unaware of the war crimes its government perpetrated, and when confronted with the fact, become quite defensive about it.
So no, objectivity is impossible. Objectivity is bullshit. Rather, journalists should strive to be fair and accurate. Every reporter is going to have biases because we all have biases, but as a reporter, I should do my best to investigate all angles of the story and give my subjects an opportunity to respond if I’m making allegations against them.
And don’t even get me started on the crowd that harps on about “objectivity” in culture journalism. Holy shit, Gamergate.
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If pointless yelling matches are the only way to get Americans watching TV “news”, then there is no good in TV “news”.
Are you forgetting Al Gorezeera?
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Are you sure you wanted to go there?
Pardon me for asking but do you live in Japan and speak to the locals on this or read Japanese and have seen the textbooks in question?
I spent some time in Kawasaki as an English teacher for a church there. There was a good number of Zainichi Koreans in the congregation because the church was founded by a native-born Korean. Since I’m Korean American, the language barrier was not an issue, especially since one of the deacons had excellent English.
The Zainichis confirmed pretty much everything I read about back home about how the Japanese treat their history and the rampant racism against Koreans. Every Zainichi I spoke with also had no shortage of stories to tell about prejudice and bigotry.
That English-speaking deacon I was talking about has a Zainichi father and a Japanese mother. He always suspected that he was the recipient of passive-aggressive racism. During elementary school, teachers would ignore him, parents would never invite him for their children’s birthday parties, and he struggled to make any friends. When it was about to start high school in a new district, his father forced him to change his surname to his mother’s maiden name. Suddenly, all that resistance he faced in elementary school was gone, all because he went from being a Cho to a Kono. There was also a Zainichi girl who told me that none of her friends would take a picture with her because she wore a hanbok to her high school graduation instead of a kimono.
I mean this is a country where Zainichi Koreans are not even allowed to vote or hold political office, despite being 4-5 generations deep in the country. The alternative is for them to completely forsake their cultural identity and adopt a new Japanicized name.
Shinzo Abe is the current Prime Minister of Japan and he’s a blatant imperial apologist. So is Toru Hashimoto, the current mayor of Osaka. So is Shintaro Ishihara, who said that minorities are criminal by nature and that the Rape of Nanking is pure fiction. Ishihara was mayor of Tokyo in 2014. That’s two years ago.
These are not beliefs held by some fringe groups. These are individuals in the highest echelons of the Japanese government who are voted into power by the public. This would be like if the President of Germany, mayor of Berlin, and mayor of Frankfurt all claimed that the Holocaust is just a giant Jewish conspiracy.
So yes, I have spoken to locals. No, I don’t read Japanese nor have I seen the textbooks, but the scholars who study East Asian relations do and have. They have all arrived to the same conclusion: Japan has a humongous problem owning up to its own history which continues to perpetuate systematic racism against the very people they massacred, raped, imprisoned, and performed live biological experiments on during World War II.
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So long story short you don’t actually know what the textbooks say or what Japanese people think.
Having lived in Japan for the last 18-19 years and being able to read the language and talk to people, let me offer you some anecdotal comments in return for yours. There are many shades of opinion amongst the people and an amazing range of books on the subject of the pacific war available. The high school texts which garnered so much attention cover the war in at least as much detail as those in the US or the UK.
You will probably get lots of likes for your post as you have referred to popular opinions. It’s not so popular to say things like “non citizens don’t get voting rights in most countries”. Fact is by definition if someone is Zainichi they refuse to get citizenship. Legally they are “special permanent residents”, which is like US green cards which are inheritable, except it’s easier for an SPR to get citizenship. I’m a regular permanent resident but it would take more for me to get citizenship than an SPR.
It’s also unpopular to say Abe is the best PM here is n decades but it’s true, all that one sided Wiki stuff not withstanding. For what it’s worth a few weeks ago Abe & president Park announced a deal to close the comfort women issue. Not to mention all the other foreign relations efforts as well as domestic policies to get wages up and increase women in management, etc. Still people will complain, that’s life.
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I think many of the replies here are oversimplifying this into
see, I toldja 'muricans don’t like them weird foreign ay-rab types
when the reality is there was a lot of plain old mismanagement:
Please, don’t oversimplify this story into something it really isn’t.
Sorry for the separate reply but they s here what you said is so far off to hat it isn’t even wrong. It’s a false analogy to compare the war in east Asia to the holocaust. Not even the PRC goes that far when they do their corpse accounting.
Actually, I liked his post because it provided information to back up his opinion and was an interesting post.
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He provided interesting anecdotes and linked to incredibly one sided Wikipedia articles.
Well, link to something more balanced then…
