Al Jazeera Documentary

Tonight I just watched a pretty good Documentary called Control Room. Basically, it is a documentary about Al Jazeera's coverage of the first stages of the war in Iraq. It is really interesting because they do a great job of presenting both sides of the media's coverage and each side's bias. It is really interesting to hear some of the discussions between the extremely intelligent Al Jazeera reporters and the US Military's finely tuned media relations gurus. The thing that most struck me from the movie was the well-publicized removal of the Saddam statue in the square in Baghdad. Like many people I presume, I didn't know much about that other than the images I saw on TV, but according to the movie, it was likely all staged. Of course that statue was located in a media heavy area. No reporters at the scene recall any local people emerging from their houses to join the crowd. One Iraqi reporter said the people present at the statue's destruction weren't even Iraqis. Many people, including myself, might not have even realized that this event was put on just to further America's mission of liberation from a brutal dictator. If the Iraqis were this intense in removing a statue of Saddam, then US Troops would easily have their way in Iraq. We were there doing the right thing weren't we? A year and a half and thousands of lives later, Iraq is on the brink of civil war and there's no end in sight. The Al Jazeera home page is pretty good, it's a great alternative for people tuned in only to American or Western news sources. Usually their top stories are things that barely even make it onto CNN.