In 1996, Al Jazeera was launched with a $150 million grant from the emir of Qatar and currently has close to 50 million viewers (a viewer-ship rivaling the BBC). The first Arabic news site, aljazeera.net, was created in 2001 as an outgrowth of the television network. The English language site claims that it provides “freedom of thought, independence, and room for debate” by offering a “different and new perspective” from the stereotypical news “heavyweights” (read: western news outlets) that dominate news thinking. And yet over the past ten years, Al Jazeera has come under fire from Arab governments for its critical approach to regime policy and has been condemned by some of its Muslim viewers who object to the station giving air time to Israeli officials. More recently, with the onset of the war in Iraq and September 11th, Al Jazeera has been accused of promoting anti-American propaganda and acting as the “mouth piece of Osama bin Laden” as some in the Bush administration have charged.
The tension between Al Jazeera as catering to an Arab audience and its Arab underwriters, and its location in the broader context of the so called ‘objective’ news media is explored both internally and externally in Control Room. Noujaim provides a microcosmic vision of Al Jazeera through the voices and insights of its producers, translators, journalists and cameramen as a way to engage larger topics of objectivity and war media coverage of the war in Iraq. At times limited by its underlying sympathy for Al Jazeera, Control Room brings to the surface a level of critical analysis oftentimes bereft in Western news media, while also exposing a universal subjectivity and partiality inherent in all war-time journalism. In creating Control Room, Noujaim sought to give audiences insight into the reality of war reporting in order to help viewers understand the differences between what is seen on their television sets in the west and those of their Middle Eastern counterparts. As Noujaim noted in an interview with CNN: “Since September 11th, there has been enormous pressure not to criticize the President…and if we are not knowledgeable of what the other side is thinking then I think we are in trouble.” Floating between omniscient documentarian and inextricably involved critic, Noujaim breaks down some of the myths of Al Jazeera and in the process, those about the war-time media at large.
A tension between approaches to war journalism emerges early in the film, centering on the war of images. Al Jazeera oftentimes shows gruesome images of dead soldiers, civilians, children, and frequently runs videos of Al-Qaeda; whereas Western media coverage maintains explicit policies against showing the dead bodies of fallen soldiers or those who have been harmed by U.S. bombing. Noujaim capitalizes on this disparity in representation, highlighting the rift between self imposed censorship and the ‘reality’ on the ground. Al Jazeera journalist Hassan Ibrahim, the former head of the BBC Arab New Service, makes explicit Al Jazeera’s stance on the war of images: “we’ve got the pictures,” he states, “so we will show them, we’ll catch hell from the Americans, but we’ll show them.” Ibrahim’s conjecture about ‘catching hell from the Americans’ is responded to by a news clip of Donald Rumsfeld condemning Al Jazeera for “playing propaganda over and over again…we are dealing with people who are willing to lie to the world to make their case.” Juxtaposed as two extremes, these views alone would set-up a tired oppositional dialog, but Noujaim makes a significant move, cutting in another perspective on the matter with a brief conversation from Abdallah Schliefer, a Western media analyst. Schliefer suggest that the Western media is not going to be able to stop Al Jazeera from showing gruesome images of the war, and those images are what is shaping Middle Eastern perspective of the war. This perspective remains largely unarticulated in Western media, which has led in Schliefer’s view to misconceptions among the American people about how the government should be handling or has been mishandling the situation. “We don’t have the pictures of insurgents using people as human shields, so how can we prove it?” Schliefer asks. The narrative of truth in the Iraq war is delivered by Al Jazeera through images of the dead, dying and injured. Here, Noujaim parodies Rumsfeld’s revelation half-way through the film (“truth ultimately finds its way to people’s eyes and ears and hearts”) removing the statement from its condemning context that references the grotesque lies mapped out in the images displayed on Al Jazeera, to suggest an echoing paradox: the evidentiary visual artifacts of this war will find their way to the people’s eyes, ears, and hearts; forming a visual truth, that cannot be challenged by the verbal contradictions of a visually unengaged Western perspective.
Noujaim is not claiming Al Jazeera is objective just because it shows images of the dead, she instead insists upon a more nuanced understanding of war media coverage where individuals on a daily basis make sometimes subjective decisions about what is communicated to the public—whether they are accepting the news briefings they receive at the U.S. military’s Central Command without critical intervention, or bringing a leftist Bush bashing professor onto their nightly programs. Lieutenant Josh Rushing, the open minded and boyish U.S. military press officer, expands: “when I watch Al Jazeera I can always tell what they aren’t saying, what they are leaving out;” a realization that applies to the Western media as well. Rushing embodies a patriotic yet skeptical view of the war and its media coverage. As the film unfolds Rushing becomes more sympathetic to the plight of Al Jazeera and their particular brand of war reporting. The viewer is almost endeared to Rushing, although he is the voice and uniformed figure on the television that spins the military’s official version of the ‘truth on the ground,’ he is willing to communicate with Al Jazeera reporters and learn and debate their perspective. He is balanced in his personal pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the Arab view, but Rushing also maintains his allegiance to his country. In many ways, his character mirrors that of his foil, Hassan Ibrahim. They both traverse the liminal landscape between objectivity and subjectivity, allegiance and their personal sentiments, arriving at a complexity each and every journalist faces in reporting the news from Iraq. In the end of the film, Noujaim’s characters seem to arrive at a difficult enlightenment—the war is messy as the Al Jazeera manager Joanne Tucker cites, and as such, representing it is a messy project.
Jean-Luc Godard called unedited film “truth at twenty-four frames per second.” The documentary nature of Control Room and Noujaim’s application of cinema verite— where a natural and non-intrusive technique of filming is used to elicit a more truthful documentation of events—attempts to arrive at Godard’s presupposition. Yet in its very subject, Control Room, challenges such attempts at objectivity and truth. In the process of unraveling the myths held about war-media coverage, Noujaim brings to the fore, her own myth. Noujaim, just as the Arab and Western media outlets depicted in her film, has turned the “reality of the world,” as Roland Barthes states, “into an image of the world.” She has provided a brief glimpse of Al Jazeera, but did not once mention its origins, funding, or the long standing trouble between the station and the Arab states where it is broadcast. Also remiss in the film, although probably due to its ‘cinema verite’ nature and not because Noujaim “didn’t know what she was filming” as some critics have suggested, is any critical analysis of Al Jazeera’s impact on its viewers. Only in the outtakes do we get any insight into the possible democratizing role the television station provides by giving viewers the opportunity to speak their once silenced opinions. Deema Khatib, a producer at Al Jazeera, illuminates a complicated aspect of the station’s and the Iraqi people’s internal conflict, “we liked the idea of overthrowing Sadaam Hussein, but then what do we do afterwards?” As Rami Khouri explains in his article “Arab Satellite TV: Promoting Deomcracy or Autocracy,” the media activities in the region are still totally divorced from the political processes, the people of Iraq can’t translate effectively their views into real-decision making scenarios. Noujaim skirts over these issues, replacing them with footage of a failing war and its early failing democratization efforts; but in doing so, she does not suggest any recourse for the Iraqi people. Their voices and perspectives can be heard on Al Jazeera, but they seem at least in Control Room to be only voices, without a political apparatus to support them or the personal motivation to create a government that would. And perhaps the point in the end is that it is not the Iraqi people’s responsibility to fix the mess. In the closing minutes of the film, Noujaim turns the camera back on its American viewers with a final weighty statement from Hassan Ibrahim: “I have absolute confidence in the American people to stop this war.”

Roland Barthes. Mythologies. 35th ed. Canada: Harper Collins Canada Ltd., 1999. 141.
Rami Khouri. “Arab Satellite TV: Promoting Democracy or Autocracy.” 9 May 2001. Jordan Times.
Donald Rumsfeld. Interview with Jamil Azer of Al Jazeera. Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Al Jazeera TV. 25 Feb. 2003. .