Control Room

I have been posting links to websites and things we hear on the news, but I would like to take this blog time to write about something I found to be very inspiring and useful from another class I had last semester. Like I said in my introduction paragraph, I am a Communication major. There is so much I find interesting with communication and how and why and the types of communication available, but I really enjoy news and journalism the most.

Like so many other Communication classes we go over these other types of  things, but what really tied it all together and my love for international affairs was the documentary Control Room (link below). If you ever have a chance to watch this, it is very well done.

Control Room is a documentary made in 2004 from the news organization Al Jazeera's point of view- relevant because they just opened Al Jazeera America.  Al Jazeera headquarters are based in Doha, Qatar. In 2004, America, like so many other allies, was at war in the Middle East and news coverage of the war was picked up from around the world. The documentary walks us through how news coverage in war is conducted. I thought the most interesting thing about the documentary is that it is from Al Jazeera's view point. Our cultures are similar yet so different, and seeing their point of view about war and media and other's media coverage was quite interesting.

One thing I found most interesting was the critique of American coverage of the war. Al Jazeera is known in America for their more graphic depiction of the war. While we can fight about whether the scenes with children suffering and so on is from an American strike, no matter it is still a chid in distress or people dead lined up along the street curbs. At the time Bush was president, and he went on air and demanded Al Jazeera stop displaying to captured, tortured, and dead America soldiers on their air for everyone to see. As Americans we get upset by these images. Now this is where the interesting part comes in. We get upset with Al Jazeera for showing these Americans, our own citizens, in distress, but we show these images of children, men, woman of the Middle East dead, hurt, distraught all the time without double thinking once.

They interviewed the Communication Director at the media base in the Middle East where all the media base in the coverage of war, and he had the same reaction I did. He had never thought of it that way and the cultural difference just goes to show the type of thinking that goes on between the two cultures. Now, of course any newsource you have to take with a grain of salt, because as we all know, there are biases everywhere.

What are your reactions? Have you seen this documentary before?


Link to documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPUx7OH1T8

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357051/al-jazeera-comes-america-clifford-d-may