A lot of ink has been spilled the past several days over Lara Logan’s comments on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart about how she doesn’t watch the U.S. television news– even though she’s CBS’s Chief Foreign Correspondent– and if she did, she would “blow [her] brains out” because it would “drive her nuts.”
I share the sentiment. Television news here is terrible. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the networks, they’re all terrible. They are all utterly unwatchable. The BBC World News hasn’t been that great since before I went to college. The venerable News Hour, which I still think is the best U.S.-based television news, just doesn’t have the news-gathering capability to put out the product that it should Having Margaret Warner in Pakistan from time to time is nice, but they rely on short, voiced-over clips from Independent Television News for most of their international reporting. That just won’t do.
So, most of my news comes from print. Recently, though, I’ve added a television news source. In fact, the source is so good that I can hardly keep up with what it produces. I have over ten videos waiting in my Miro queue: one about Thai street food, another about the “judicial system” in Iraq, an interview with the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, and a feature about problems with urban growth in Indonesia. These are mostly longer-form videos of at least eight or nine minutes, many times what most cable news features in this country are.
The channel is Al-jazeera English, and you can’t watch it in this country without buying a satellite dish or watching on the Internet.
Let’s dispose of a few things right off the bat. It’s not anti-semitic. Israel has more restrictions on speech and the press than we do and the network airs there. Not only that, but it’s quite popular there. Moreover, it’s not editorially “anti-American.”
It’s simply the best television news I’ve seen in quite some time. They hired all the professional journalists from the BBC, gave them plenty of money and time, and let them do their work. It’s a pleasure to watch.
I just watched a twenty-minute interview on Al-jazeera with Noam Chomsky, one of the nation’s foremost public intellectuals. Problem is, he can’t get a lick of airtime on television. William F. Buckley got television’s version of state funeral (rivaled only by the unseemly, lugubrious mess that followed Tim Russert’s death) and Noam Chomsky, whose work (most prominently as a linguist) unquestionably (and regardless of viewpoint) is superior to Buckley’s, can’t get a segment on Anderson Cooper 360.
Chomsky’s viewpoint is not the only one systematically excluded from television. The other voices, and the reasons for their suppression, are a larger matter than I can tackle here (or anywhere).
But are you not horrified, whether you want to watch it or not, that a network is being systematically prevented from being shown in your home in totalitarian fashion?
Like any television network, it could go sour quickly. Remember when CNN was a decent source of news? Faintly, if at all, I bet. I can’t vouch for Al-jazeera in the future. But I can vouch for it now, and it’s the best source for television news out there, even if you can’t get it on your television.