Michael Paterniti Goes Behind the Scenes at Al Jazeera English [from GQ]
If the so-called Arab Spring recently focused American awareness on the raft of Middle Eastern countries trying to shirk their repressive regimes—from Tunisia to Bahrain, from Yemen to Egypt and Libya—then it also threw into high relief the difference between what we’ve come to accept as our television “news” here in America and what a network like Al Jazeera presents of the world each day, many times through a lens that has an almost populist, retro feel, hearkening to some earlier era—the advent of network television, say, when everyone was unknown, relatively untested, improvising as they went….
But, then, what exactly were Americans hungering to watch? None other than Hillary Clinton offered a gambit. “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news,” the secretary of state told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a particularly heavy Charlie Sheen week on American TV. “You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.”
