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Televising Bloody Children
Control Room opens with images of poverty in the Arab
world, the now-familiar cluster of children clutching their
mother directly below her hijab. The final clip of
opening credits, though, is a strikingly poetic image of what
al-Jazeera perceives as its mission statement: A homemade
satellite cobbled together from stray wire and a rusty colander,
planted in the upturned concrete of the Arab Street. Cut to
an Arab coffee shop, the type you could find on Main Street
USA, with a room full of horrified locals watching Bush's
ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on March 17, 2003. Cut to the
al-Jazeera production studios, where a reporter tells us,
"Al-Jazeera's job is to educate the Arab people on democracy...to
awaken them." According to Control Room, al-Jazeera
is simply offering an alternative viewpoint to its core audience.
Why should America and British mega-corps be the world's only
source of news?
Al-Jazeera comes to this conclusion based on a two-steps-removed
relationship to Fox News. Fox's "We Report, You Decide"
motto is, to anyone watching critically, a cynical slogan.
Fox's audience has already decided how it feels, so the "news"
is simply reconfirming these entrenched viewpoints. That's
not journalism--the cart is before the horse. Fox's defenders
usually argue that the "conservative" viewpoint
is simply "balancing" the viewpoint of the "liberal
media." Yet, it's part of Bill O'Reilly's shtick that
he's the tough-minded independent on a network that claims
to be "fair and balanced", to the point of threatening
to sue The New York Times for referring to it as the
"conservative news channel." It's propaganda masquerading
as news, funded by and ran by conservatives to rally its base
and obfuscate actual news items in the legitimate media.
Control Room argues that al-Jazeera, in the way the
Fox tries to "balance" the liberal media, is just
"balancing" the pro-Western view with the viewpoint
of the Arab Street--indeed, they leave "fair and balanced"
out of their translations of Fox News reports. By the end
of Control Room, it's very clear that al-Jazeera has
co-opted the Fox News template, and in doing so, the two have
blurred the line between journalism and propaganda. This is
nothing new, nor an argument for the sanctity of the networks
and newspapers, but a renaissance of Yellow Journalism, fueled
by the immediacy of technology and lots of money. In fact,
Control Room is a sly bit of propaganda itself, casting
al-Jazeera as the innocent victim of the Bush Administration's
deceit. Donald Rumsfeld says all sorts of awful things about
al-Jazeera, always shown on a screen looking down on us, intoning
pronouncements like "Al-Jazeera is the mouthpiece of
Osama bin Ladin"--as if he (Rumsfeld) is Big Brother
rallying against Goldstein.
But one comes away from Control Room with the sense
that al-Jazeera, even though it's funded by Qatari sheiks
primarily to rouse the Middle East against Western aggression,
makes some very salient points about America's actions in
the region. The film attempts to win our sympathy by bridging
some gaps between "us" and "them" by showing
us bustling Arab cities only differing from Akron and Toledo
by architecture. We get to know some of the journalists, including
Hassan Ibrahim, the really fat guy you might have seen making
the rounds on America talk shows a few months ago. He's on
his way to Central Command in Qatar, just a few miles from
al-Jazeera's studios, blaring blues music and calling his
wife--a kindly British woman--on his cell phone. He says that
most Arabs believe what most anti-war American liberals believe:
That Bush used Saddam to keep Americans feeling under siege,
a political move designed to assure reelection. When the AJ
team arrives, they pal around with a few familiar faces, including
MSNBC's David Shuster, for instance. They chat it up with
the guys from CNN, who seem to have a real respect for the
gusto of al-Jazeera's reporting--like a mainstream pop artist
admiring an experimental guitar album. The Fox guys, of course,
sequester themselves from everyone; we see their door in the
primo office of Cent Comm, shut off from the rest of the corps.
The rest of the film shows us how al-Jazeera reported on
the Iraq War. The real villain here isn't George W. Bush,
but Donald Rumsfeld. We hear a press conference in which Rumsfled
talks about al-Jazeera's "lies" and continual reporting
on the death in Iraq, overlaying images of bloody children
and bomb damage. The effect is undeniable, especially for
those keen to the Bush Administration's ban on showing the
caskets of fallen soldiers on the news. And this is how it
goes for an hour an: Rumsfeld and Bush say one thing, al-Jazeera
reports the stark reality on the other. The film shows, from
a reporters view, how the US used the Jessica Lynch story
as a distracting propaganda piece, and how the unveiling of
the infamous Deck of Cards was so flip that you can see why
the Arab Street would view the US with extreme cynicism. "Watching
the war in America," Ibrahim says, "is like watching
a movie." The US often looks bad here, especially when
Donald Rumsfled talks of taking out the al-Jazeera Baghdad
headquarters, juxtaposed with an AJ reporter on top of the
building with his helmet on, reporting live right up until
five minutes before he was killed by a bomb.
But for all of the American hypocrisy, it's an America communications
agent, Lt. Josh Rushing, who finds the glaring hole in al-Jazeera's
coverage. For all the massive piles of dead bodies killed
by Americans, Rushing says "I can always tell what al-Jazeera
is leaving out--the same as Fox." What about Saddam's
mass graves, or the torture in his prisons, or any of his
three decades worth of crimes against humanity? This is an
unusually bold statement, a complete contrast to every other
American official in the film--indeed, it's Lt. Rushing, not
al-Jazeera, that emerges as the hero of the film. When we
meet Lt. Rushing in the beginning of the film, he's completely
overmatched by the giant Ibrahim, both physically and intellectually.
It's obvious that Rushing is just quoting the script, saying
his lines and expecting the al-Jazeera guys to accept it.
But Ibrahim doesn't, and he badgers Rushing into a honesty
that neither al-Jazeera of Fox would probably share on the
air. He explains that, yes, he's seen the images of bloody
children on al-Jazeera. But he admits that he was momentarily
disgusted by the images, but then he forgot about them. The
next night he saw images of American soldiers taken hostage
on al-Jazeera, and it made him sick to his stomach. But here's
the revelation: Rushing says that he later felt awful about
not feeling as bad about the Iraqis as he did about the Americans,
and that made him question his own humanity. "(this episode)
made me hate war. But I also believe in a world that can't
exist without it."
The fact that Control Room is willing to undermine,
to a certain extent, its own heroism of al-Jazeera elevates
the film above the pure propagandist vitriol of, say, Michael
Moore. If one becomes numb to the violence, the most moving
scene in the whole film is when Lt. Josh Rushing, Cent Comm
communications agent, invites the al-Jazeera reporter to his
office for cheesecake to talk about how the Israeli/Palestinian
situation contributes to anti-Americanism, etc.--a real dialogue
about the war. In the end, Rushing's humanity stands outside
of both the Bush Administration and al-Jazeera's blustering
about the war. Rushing sees that they both have a point, but
they're not willing to sacrifice any part of that certainty
for common understanding and, perhaps, progress in this increasingly
painful situation. In confronting the tough questions mass
death raises, Lt. Rushing finds truth that neither news organization
can uncover because of a mandate to maintain their "perspectives."
This is the power of the documentary over the "news,"
and this is why giving Control Room four stars doesn't
make you anti-American. One of the Ibrahim's final observations
is that "all that twill be left from this war is scripts,"
but I think his polarizing "all" is misplaced. There's
at least one lieutenant who is willing to ad-lib in front
of an independent camera.
For a report on President Bush's trip to Springfield, Missouri
earlier this year--and ignoring a fallen soldier's family
in favor of a trip to huge donor John E. Morris' Bass Pro
Shops--click on the
filmsnobs' blog and scroll down to "President
Bush Tells Some Big Fish Stories in Springfield"
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