Tag: Al Jazeera

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The war on media was inspired by America and encouraged by Barack Obama. Obama rocks. Not

Egypt’s al-Jazeera trial was inspired by America’s global war on journalism

   From a War on Terror to a war on leaks, now comes America’s shadow influence on a media crackdown

   Ten years ago, the United States also justified its detention of al-Jazeera journalists by claiming a “national security threat”. These arrests could not be cloaked as mere collateral damage in a messy war. The US, then as Egypt does now, made leaping connections between the news network and militants, and specifically targeted those whose coverage did not serve the military’s objectives: Dick Cheney warned that al-Jazeera risked being “labeled as ‘Osama’s outlet to the world‘”; Donald Rumsfeld called the network’s coverage of the Iraq war “vicious, inaccurate, inexcusable”.

   Over the next several years, US forces arrested and detained al-Jazeera journalists like Sami al Hajj and Salah Hasan Nusaif Jasim al Ejaili. US military forces captured both in separate instances while they were doing their jobs, and tortured them while attempting to establish ties between al-Jazeera and al-Qaida. Neither al Hajj nor al Ejaili received justice for their wrongful detention. After seven years of imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay, the US government released al Hajj to Sudanese authorities, without any reparations. Meanwhile al Ejaili, who was detained at Abu Ghraib, brought a case with other victims against the private military contractor at the prison, alleging it conspired to commit torture and war crimes. But the case was dismissed by the district court. The court perversely ordered al Ejaili and other plaintiffs to pay their alleged torturers for the cost of the suit. The case is pending on appeal.

   The reverberations of this misguided War on Terror continue, even if the war has shifted: the Obama administration has famously invoked the Espionage Act more than any other American president, attempting to control press leaks with tactics a report found to be “the most aggressive … since the Nixon administration“.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Shorty after 8 PM EST, I was watching Current TV‘s “Viewpoint” with Eliot Spitzer when the feed was abruptly terminated and this message appeared on the screen

This channel is no longer available on Time Warner Cable.

Visit

www.TWCConversations.com

to find other sources for similar

programming

I was aware of the news that CurrentTV had been sold to Al jazeera and was under the impression that the current programming would continue for another three months. When the feed stopped, I went to Twitter and found these posts by Ryan Grim

Time Warner Cable is dropping Current for selling to Al Jazeera, according to a Current memo to staff. Wow.

– Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 3, 2013

In the interest of disclosure, I contribute to Al Jazeera, but would find Time Warner Cable blocking them to be offensive either way

– Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 3, 2013

There was brief mention in the Forbes article that TWC had not approved the deal and would drop “drop Current from its menu going forward. TWC’s 12 million  9 million households represent 20%  15% of Current’s total reach.”

But WOW in the middle of a broadcast at 8 PM..

Up Date 21:18 EST: This explains a lot, from Current TV CEO Joel Hyatt’s memo:

  ” Getting this transaction done was very difficult.  One of Current’s distributors, Time Warner Cable, did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera.  Consequently, Current will no longer be carried on TWC.  This is unfortunate, but I am confident that Al Jazeera America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years ahead.  In the United Kingdom, it has become the number three news network (behind the BBC and Sky News).  It did that by investing in great programming – as it intends to do in the United States.”

h/t Just Bob

Israeli missiles hit the building twice, injuring at least six journalists in the process. The strikes were condemned by press freedom groups, though Israel said it was aiming for Hamas communications equipment on the roof of the buildings. On Monday, it killed a member of the Islamic Jihad group in one of the buildings

“Rockets don’t stop at a roof,” Jordon said in response. “You’ve got the intelligence that journalists were all over that building. It’s never going to be precise enough that you can’t stop injuring people below the roof.”

“As far as I know, no foreign journalists were hurt whatsoever,” Regev said. “We were surgical, we took out the target that we wanted to take out.”

“You can’t sit there and say no journalists were injured,” Jordon replied sharply. “One person had their leg blown off. That is a fact.”

“Maybe we have a discussion about who is a journalist,” Regev said. He called Al-Aqsa, one of the outlets targeted in the strikes, a “Hamas command and control facility,” adding, “Just as in other totalitarian regimes, the media is used by the regime for command and control and also for security purposes. From our point of view, that’s not a legitimate journalist.”

For the past five days, Egyptians have been in the streets protesting, calling for President Mubarak, who has served for thirty years, to step down.  It is a very big story.  Print media, understandably have trouble keeping up with it because so much is happening so quickly in so many places.  Putting up a written story takes time, time to write, time to edit, time to post.  Even if you’re lightning fast, print media (and the part of them that is on the Internet) aren’t built for this kind of speed.  But what about television?

From Al Jazeera June 29, 2009 – 25 minutes

I use a ‘Live TV’ toolbar to get a number of stations, worldwide, which brings up a player that stays up as I’m browsing or working. Most aren’t worth watching or are not in english, but some interest viewing can be found as well as a few english language News Programs or Networks, like the BBC and Al Jazeera.

Checking in on Al Jazeera English to see what they were reporting, most of the time like the BBC and a few others, much more than the U.S. MSM, free press and all, on Iraq and Afganistan and other regions, I caught the near ending of a Special Program series they are running called ‘Veterans’.

Don Rumsfeld was charged with war-crimes today. Bushco’s connection to Mid-East terrorism and pork may be the next story to blow.

Wapo

Retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, a former NATO commander Bush appointed last year as his special envoy to work on the issue, left the job recently because of what several sources described as his frustration at the administration’s failure to devote serious attention to the problem. Ralston, vice chairman of an international consulting firm led by former defense secretary William S. Cohen, did not return several calls for comment.

There’s far more at stake…