This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.
and
Al Jazeera English, run by a 35-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, is routinely available in Israel and Canada. It provided coverage of the 2009 Gaza war and this year’s Tunisian revolt when no other television networks would or could. Yet in America, it can be found only in Washington, D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner — offer it.
The noxious domestic political atmosphere fostering this near-blackout is obvious to all. It was made vivid last week when Bill O’Reilly of Fox News went on a tear about how Al Jazeera English is “anti-American.” This is the same “We report, you decide” Fox News that last week broke away from Cairo just as the confrontations turned violent so that viewers could watch Rupert Murdoch promote his new tablet news product at a publicity event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.
A few of thoughts.
On the US Media.
Our media, especially television, just plain sucks, with most stories being directed at odd angles of the subject at hand for example,.. With Egypt the stories were, the social media is great, Al Jazeera is evil, it is Bushes fault, it is Obama's fault, the Muslim Brotherhood is evil, etc. With Wikileaks, the cables themselves were hardly covered at all in this country; the stories were about Assange, the "rape", his arrest, etc. TV News just dances around the story offering little real content.
On Social Networking.
Playing up the Internet and social networking's place in the uprising may not be "implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism" but more "the latest-greatest-thing" chauvinism. Social Networking is the latest killer-app of the Internet (the last latest-and-greatest). It's on everyone mind. It seems natural for media types to look for ways to give it credit and tie it to every major news story. If our crappy media were around during the civil war there would have been "trains change warfare" stories. WW1 would have had "Airplanes change warfare stories", WWII probably "Radios or RADAR" change warfare.
On Al Jazeera and US Media
Al-Jazeera should be on all US cable outlets. Some competition in the news market couldn't hurt, could it?
I'm sure one argument of the cable providers would be that there's no market for Al Jazeera, but I think Egypt's revolution has proven this wrong. Besides, is there really a market for 37 home shopping channels?
On Censorship.
Censorship in the US, whether intentional by our government/media, the result of inept media agents or simply set by market forces is being exposed by the Internet. However, the Internet also makes it very easy to hide the true story behind floods of disinformation. Our mass media also play the disinformation game very well. Fox News is the master but the others play it at as well. I fear this censorship-thru-disinformation will get worse before it gets better.
tnb
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