The Responsibility Of Privilege

Chomsky said that a black activist had recounted a story in which a group of African American women visited the President following his inauguration in 2009. After the meeting, the disappointed women told the black activist, “this man has no moral center.”

“I think they’re right,” Chomsky said. “If you look at his policies, I think that is what they reveal. Just some nice rhetoric here and there. If you look at the actual policies, they’re pretty shocking. The drone assassination campaign is a perfectly good example. I mean, that’s just a global assassination campaign.”

Critics of the use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen worry the practice violates international law and kills civilians.

Chomsky also downplayed Obama’s efforts to block Israel settlements into Palestinian territory. Though the Obama administration has repeatedly criticized Israel’s settlement activity, they had not imposed any actual penalties, unlike previous presidents, Chomsky said.

“In fact, Obama is actually the first president who hasn’t really imposed restrictions on Israel,” he added.

Hypocrisy Over The Al Jazeera Deal

Al Jazeera America, Test Case For An Open Society

Neil Macdonald writes:

The network, owned and operated by the Emirate of Qatar, no longer has anything to prove about the quality of its journalism. It has won all sorts of prestigious awards and broken all sorts of stories.

It is now in 80 million homes worldwide, and is known in our business as the outfit that's always in places nobody else covers.

Late last year, for example, as the rest of the English-language media were concentrating on the crisis in Egypt, AJE's Nazanine Moshiri was travelling with the M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, broadcasting live several times a day.

That sort of thing has made the network a must-watch for agencies like the U.S. State Department, especially as Western networks and newspapers scale back, closing their foreign bureaus wholesale.

But Americans with enough savvy to seek out AJE must do so on the internet. Because after more than six years of operation, the network remains effectively locked out of the American cable TV market.

Last week, after the announcement that AJE had bought Al Gore's Current TV (for something like $500 million), and with it access to as many as 40 million American homes, Time Warner immediately announced it was dropping Current from its cable roster.

The move was reminiscent of the Comcast decision not to carry AJE here when the network first launched in 2006.

It's been a pattern. The country that, in the name of free speech, allows flag-burning, Ku Klux Klan marches and protests at military funerals by religious zealots hoisting "God hates fags" placards decided years ago that AJE represents the kind of speech it simply cannot tolerate.

"It's insane that a country as important and as vibrant and diverse as the United States would have such a banana republic approach to news and information," says Tony Burman, the former CBC editor in chief who spent years as AJE's managing director, trying to win cable TV carriage in the U.S. market.

"The fear-mongering has been surreal."

Jon Stewart pointed out on the Daily Show:

"somehow they've overlooked boss Rupert Murdoch's twenty-percent stake in Rotana, an Arab station co-owned by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Rupert Murdoch profiting from the airing of that type of anti-American propaganda? Say it ain't so. "

What Role Is The US Media Playing?

By Diana Mukkaled
March 12, 2011
Courtesy Of "Al-Sharq Al-Awsat"

Over the past few weeks, western political commentators, particularly those in the US, have been involved in discussing how modern western technologies, particularly social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook, have served as the catalyst for the revolutionary movement in the Arab world.
The US internet industry has, in effect, given itself credit for overthrowing the regimes of both Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

What is most striking about these discussions, other than their obvious ignorance about the distinctions between different countries and societies in the Middle East, is that they have neglected the role played by WikiLeaks and the leaked diplomatic cables, which is something that we must not disregard when discussing the initial reasons behind the population uprisings in the Arab world.

It was thanks to WikiLeaks that the Tunisians were able to read the truth about the corruption of the regime that was oppressing them. WikiLeaks also allowed the Egyptians to view secret information about their own regime, which was no less scandalous than some of the details surrounding the Ben Ali regime.

However, the role of WikiLeaks, Twitter, and Facebook pale in comparison to the role played by satellite news channels, and particularly Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Millions of Arabs are unable to access the afore-mentioned websites, but they are all able to watch satellite television. It might be useful here to cite the admission made by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton a few days ago when she acknowledged that her country is losing the information war. Clinton criticized the US media and its superficial approach to the news, whilst praising Al Jazeera, particularly its English language news service, describing this as presenting "real news."

Even if US technologies have – via social networking websites – contributed, in one way or another to the momentum of the popular uprisings in the Arab world, or helped the Arab reform movements to develop, this is something that in no way, shape, or form applies to the Western news media, and particularly the American news. This is not just because the majority of Arabs do not watch these channels, and these television channels are not interested in targeting Arab viewers.

The US media's view of the world has informed its view of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, for it divides the world into good and evil as if real life is like a Hollywood movie where the hero bravely fights against the forces of evil and always triumphs. The US media, or rather the prevailing current within the US media, views and understands the world through a patriotic lens. Hillary Clinton's praised Al Jazeera as if she has forgotten that her country continues to ban this channel, despite the fact that it is the US State Department that is always criticizing the policies of censorship in countries like Iran.

American technology might have played a role in the great changes being witnessed by the Middle East, and it is only right that this technology should be praised for this, however as much as these revolutions require technology that facilitates communication, they also requires a spirit of open discussion and debate rather than bias and prejudice. Indeed, it is incomprehensible how the American media can cover Arab revolutions and uprisings and focus almost exclusively on the extent of the impact that these will have on Israel, and future Arab relations with Tel Aviv.

Indeed, a new ethical question is beginning to be asked of Western news media, a question that reflects a similar question being asked of Western governments, namely; why have they been silent about the corruption and despotism of certain Arab regimes until now, the extent of which has only been revealed following the ouster of two Arab regimes?