Kathleen Fleming
Global Media – Al-Jazeera Review
April 21, 2008

The Image has a unique power to turn abstractions and hearsay into reality for any audience in some way displaced (e.g. spatially, temporally, socio-economically) from the object. An Abel Gance character understood the hold of images over public incitement to action when he cried (in a pre-WWII context), “Fill your eyes with this horror. It is the only thing that can stop you!” (Montag 16). The Image connects the uninvolved, un-inflicted, though still opinionated masses to the sufferers and makes the “suffering of others” believable. Vietnam, as explained by Montag, gave the American public a “tele-intimacy with death and destruction” (21), which turned popular sentiment against the military machine. In 2006, with the launching of Al-Jazeera International and in a context of live feeds and “new media,” the largely uni-directional international news coverage (by the West; of the developing world) began to get feedback sourced from within the core developing region.

Given the channel’s vast access to local sources of information and experience with dominant cultural logics in the Middle East, Al-Jazeera had been since its inception in 1996, “the most sought-after news resource in the world” (Faisal Bodi of The Guardian). Since being broadcast in English, the network’s role as a non-state force of reckoning in the Middle East is undeniable. Surprisingly, in a region with an at-best-spotty record for free speech, this network asserts that very freedom without the foundation of full political rights (i.e. democracy) for its audience. In so doing, Al-Jazeera has become a voice for the voiceless.

Al-Jazeera’s focus is foremost on issues of interest to the developing world, with the Middle East at its center. Its news reports range from democracy in Zimbabwe and Paraguay, refugee camps in Sudan and death tolls in Somalia, to outlines of U.S. presidential primaries, questionable use of military planes by Britain’s royal family, and Mobil’s unprecedented sales (apparently exceeding the GDP of 120 nation-states). While Al-Jazeera notably has shows focused on political debate and critiques of governments both big and small, and appears to balance these debates with representatives from different sides of the discussion, what is most interesting about its programming are the shows that give voices to the politically underrepresented and socially marginalized demographics of developing society: women and children.

In Everywoman and Children of Conflict, two popular Al-Jazeera programs, we see exactly what Libby Anker warned about: melodramatic narratives conceptualizing the news. In the individual cases presented in these programs, however, meta-narratives do not preclude an understanding of the “complexity and horror of events.” Rather, by including the human face and individual drama of suffering I believe we more clearly see the situation. Granted, Ms. Anker’s comment was made in reference to conceptualizing 9/11, a single-event, whereas with sex trafficking and child soldiery the media must tackle much larger, ongoing social patterns of destruction, and so are required to organize around a narrative. In these cases, Al-Jazeera has done a tremendous job of acknowledging its role as a filter for the presentation of people’s stories and opinions while still retaining its journalistic objectivity.

It is worth noting that in order to get at the heart of these programs and not have to wake up at 3:30 a.m. EST to catch live feeds, I watched a few episodes of these programs on Al-Jazeera’s website and YouTube. As far as Western news media go, not even CNN posts its programs for free viewing on either its website or YouTube. Al-Jazeera has done an exceptional job of making its programs available to viewers well after their airdate. This is important because the issues being discussed are perennial; as one host said of filming a special on Egyptian women’s lack of sexual education, it was the hot topic for social conversation for months to come. How you measure the episode’s effect in terms of tangible social change is questionable; however, that there is conversation, and better still, that it has originated not as criticism from without but as a repeated call to arms from within the Muslim world is of paramount importance.

In an Everywoman segment on the absence of sexual education and profusion of male sexual “frustration” in Egypt, the show’s guest, a therapist and marriage counselor, referred to the “hush-hush style that we use to deal with sex in the Middle East” and the local media’s refusal to cover incidents of sexual assault throughout the Muslim world. Both host and guest are Middle Eastern; such internal criticism and subsequent cry for Anker’s heroism were unprecedented in the pre-Al-Jazeera world. The images of the girls’ suffering not only demonstrate the courage and changing attitudes of people within the Arab world, but also create a sense of global camaraderie and shared purpose between Arab women and their western counterparts. Al-Jazeera taps into the sensitive issues and makes a forum of itself for their transmission to a wider audience.

Other episodes of the program call out Thai and Cambodian governments for a lack of political will to organize against human trafficking; the British government for being ill-prepared to respond to honor killings; and the U.S. Army for refusing to allow a Muslim female chaplain into its services. Al-Jazeera is an equal-opportunity critic; while its focus is certainly on issues relevant to the Middle East, it also covers the developing world and Western powers by extension of the core region’s diplomatic, social and economic relationships.

Children in Conflict sears the images (and so the realities) of children caught up in violent conflict and post-conflict situations into the conscience of a global audience. “I know what death means, what blood means,” says a twelve-year-old Gazan to an Al-Jazeera reporter. In the same segment, the reporter questions a fourteen-year-old girl who says, “If you look at [suicide bombing] from the view that life is just a passage, it’s not a bad thing.” This same girl hopes to persuade her younger cousins to also make martyrs of themselves. The reporter replies, shocked, “Do you ever think about the kids in Israel? Do you ever think that they might be suffering too?” to which the girl responds, “Just like our children live under constant fear, their children should also experience the same fear and terror…I refuse to accept that the other children of the world can live in peace and security while the children of Palestine live under terror.” The calm belief in what she’s saying and the fatalistic attitude with which she describes a violent order of retribution and of society holding itself to the lowest common condition are irreconcilable with the image of the girl’s young face. The audience cannot help but be confused: her world understanding is mired in hatred and reciprocated misery, just as is the fourteen-year-old Congolese soldier who in a different episode of Children in Conflict says that “I am young in age, but I know so many things about the world now,” and the Afghan child who says “kids in other countries have parks and schools” and then leads the camera crew to his begging post. It is clear that these children understand their situation in the context of a bigger picture; but their situation has adulterated their understanding of world order. The coverage of these human narratives show that violence breeds violence and there is a new generation caught in the cycle. And, the situation must be real, for we see it in their faces.

Susan Montag says, “For the photography of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry,” which is just as true of news coverage (26) – the audience doesn’t want their news mediated through a biased lens. Still, that Al-Jazeera presents the tone and opinion particularly of the Arab world, which the West seems to so inadequately comprehend, is in fact a tool for U.S. strategists. Al-Jazeera is the West’s means of understanding the on-the-ground realities and perspective in the developing world, and it welcomes the West’s power players to represent their positions in relation to these concerns. These power players, both as collectivities and individuals, must invert their perspective. Using Al-Jazeera as the [as far as I can tell] objective amplifier for the myriad voices in the Middle East, the U.S. stands a far better chance in the war for hearts and minds. Such usage elevates Al-Jazeera into an even more powerful global position; not only is it, as stated above, an influential non-state actor in the Muslim world, but its longevity and objectivity are in fact in the best interest of the global powers.

The global public, in the meanwhile, has a “camera-mediated knowledge of war” (Montag 24). And as a senior producer for Al-Jazeera International said in a YouTube mini-documentary, “History is written by the victors…Life will continue, will go on, there will be other problems, other things to think about. There is one single thing that will be left: victory. That’s it.” This echoes Yaron Ezrahi, who said that the “life expectancy of reality in our time is very short; short lived realities influence the way we experience the world.” Because reality is moderated by the image and by the melodramatic narrative, Al-Jazeera’s reach ought to be of serious interest to the history writers.