She is being racist
She has a very poor understanding of what's happening in Gaza, and replaces the yawning chasm that is her factual understanding with a dim stereotype view that it's a bad place because the Palestinians are terrible people who don't pull themselves up by their bootstraps
You didn't really answer the question.
Does that mean that your whole assertion that Al Jazeera was dangerous evil terrorist garbage is retracted now? I would say that they are roughly speaking a mirror image for the New York Times or similar "Israel is fine, please look away from this dead baby at this story about Hamas instead" minded paper. Or is the New York Times also dangerous and evil? Or does it work in only one direction, or how?
Someone could say that the New York Times is funded by a mindless money-driven machine which seeks only profit, and all its coverage needs to be defined in that light, and so we can safely discard anything it has to say. I wouldn't say that. But it does make arguably an equal amount of sense to discarding Al Jazeera because they're funded in part by a theocratic monarchy. I would say we should judge them primarily on their output and journalistic standards.
If anyone thinks that the CIA and deep state is still secretly controlling the United States, picking the leaders, influencing media to present only the narrative that they want to see presented... well, now you got your answer. They're not. If they were, every single TV news show every single night would be running stories about this kind of thing, and good things Biden has done, and associates of Trump who need to be in prison who aren't yet.
The irony is that some version of that influence and control campaign actually is happening now, on behalf of other countries, on social media. Their propaganda is getting presented front and center and getting tons of traction, and the US is in the unusual position of playing catch up on the influencing-mass-opinion game.
I mean, if your mindset is that Israel is the good guys and Hamas are the bad guys, and so a bias against Israel is an offensive thing and you don't want to stomach it in your news organizations, then fair enough. You can say that if you want. But I think some people will try to present that as the "objective" viewpoint and the mirror image viewpoint as the "terrorist" viewpoint. That's not really a requirement I have for my news (in either direction) -- like just tell me what happened, filter it through whatever lens is how you think it is, and let me sort out from a few multiple sources and make sense of how I think the overall picture is. As long as someone's not outright lying, it doesn't bother me. And I feel like if Al Jazeera were making up facts on any kind of regular basis I'd have heard of it, and the fact that so many authoritarian governments want to ban them kind of makes me like them.
This table shows the history; I assumed that 2023 and 2024 represent more or less the current strain, and took 6 deaths divided by 19 cases = 31% CFR.
I read part of the UN report; I would describe what they reported as "widespread." Especially since they lay out a lot of the factors that would prevent them finding out about any given instance where it happened and they still found a bunch of instances.
Sure thing. We can start with:
Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, India, Iraq: The controversy is that some government attacked Al Jazeera for its reporting and/or took away their press credentials or ability to operate. It's noted that it's banned from operating in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE.
Australia, Bangladesh: Can't completely make head or tail of what happened but it sounds like government people getting mad at Al Jazeera for their reporting, not some disinterested party saying that some reporting Al Jazeera was doing wasn't true
Israel: I found, for the first time, some pretty credible allegations of them doing something wrong, including among other things one story from February 2015 that actually seemed like something they reported wasn't true.
At that point I stopped reading the list. But I had to go 8 countries down before I found something where it actually sounded to me like they definitely did something wrong, and 9 years back before I found one story they reported that was actually completely untrue (as opposed to just a bias you have to keep in mind when reading).
Question. If an Israeli or American paper:
Would that mean it's a joke and anyone who reads it is ignorant? 'Cause they do that shit all the time. I don't think so; I think they can still be a good paper, you just have to keep in mind the bias that they have.
So, no specific example(s) of dishonest coverage from them?
Innuendo Studios calls this The Ship of Theseus -- taking individual half-truths and stringing them together into a long line to construct an aggregate statement that bears no resemblance to the truth.
Al Jazeera is the Qatari government.
* partly owned by the Qatari government
The stateargely responsible for the funding of Hamas
* responsible for maybe a third of the funding of Hamas ever since it was given the blessing of the Netanyahu government to do so
the believed home of Hamas leadership.
Not seeing the connection. "Some of Hamas's horrible and corrupt leaders live in Qatar, therefore a news outlet funded partly by the government of Qatar is obviously compromised." I mean, Jared Kushner lives in Florida. Does that mean something about the Miami Herald (or would it, if DeSantis was partially funding it)?
I don't think it's a secret that Al Jazeera has a generally pro-Arab and anti-Israeli viewpoint. I said they were fuckin fantastic and listed some reasons; I didn't say they were totally free from bias / free from having a viewpoint. But even their stories directly on the Gaza war (the most slanted selection of stuff you'll be able to find) are actually pretty factual to me. An example is this story about the Hamas rape claims. It's a little slanted. I don't agree with "while isolated rapes may have taken place, there was insufficient evidence to support allegations that rape had been 'widespread and systematic'." But, it acknowledges sexual violence and human rights violations by Hamas. That puts it absolutely well and clear above the quality of a lot of Israeli media from the mirror-image side, and actually more anti-Hamas than even a lot of the Western press on the same story, which for some reason made the whole focus of the story into the New York Times reporting "false stories," without also making it clear that yes, there was definitely sexual violence, that part is undeniably true even if some specific stories were false.
Do you know of any really severely slanted / dishonest coverage by Al Jazeera? Stories where Israel are involved, and not bothering to report anything about Jared Kushner, are the only examples I'm really aware of. Other than that kind of thing I think of it as generally excellent quality.
Yeah fair enough. If you want to know shady things about Jared Kushner (edit: or good things about Israel), they're probably not gonna say a god damned word.
There are two things that always bring me back to the politics and all the fucked up events of that time period. It was the first recent-past generation reaching adulthood that had never known anything other than a government that, for the most part, didn't give a fuck about them on any level.
This fan made video for Roger Waters's "Home." All the events in the little montage bring me back real powerful.
The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen.