At the risk of being mistaken for someone who does not love America (as distinct from those who plunder it, waste the lives of the most patriotic, crimp and impinge on the basic freedoms, etc.) I must recommend Al- Jazeera online in English.
People who read the news there are shocked to find that much of the reporting seems to be more neutral and objective, told in a less hysterical tone than that of many, if not most, of our American news conduits. Not what I expected.
Of course the selection of articles is more concerned with events in the Middle East, events that relate to the Arab and/or Muslim word. That's their world -- except that their view seems to encompass more of the non-local world than ours generally does.
And of course they favor outcomes which will be good for the Arab/Muslim world. Wouldn't you?
They don't tell us the things we want to have told to us, things which reinforce our preconceptions. They do tell us things it might be important to know, at least if we wanted to understand what the world looks like from that perspective. Since we have people killing and dying over there, learning how it looks to the people who live there might be a good thing to do.
It's unsettling to recognize that we don't seem to have a "Free press" over here as much as we have a "Popular Press." Giving mental hand-jobs to consumers is ALWAYS popular. I don't know enough about the Middle East to know if that's what they're also doing, other than their animated cartoons, which, like editorial cartoons here, are definitely opinionated, but if it is, at least their tone of voice is, as I said, more reasoned, less hysterical.
Give it a click.
You want something a little less exotic? Try BBC World News Online. After all, it's from one of our coalition partners (Don't forget Poland .. oops, oh, sorry, they pulled out, pissed off at being lied to about WMD.) It's somewhat sobering to find out how little of the news of the world involves the United States. Oh, except for the stuff where we're shooting people and blowing them up.
People who read the news there are shocked to find that much of the reporting seems to be more neutral and objective, told in a less hysterical tone than that of many, if not most, of our American news conduits. Not what I expected.
Of course the selection of articles is more concerned with events in the Middle East, events that relate to the Arab and/or Muslim word. That's their world -- except that their view seems to encompass more of the non-local world than ours generally does.
And of course they favor outcomes which will be good for the Arab/Muslim world. Wouldn't you?
They don't tell us the things we want to have told to us, things which reinforce our preconceptions. They do tell us things it might be important to know, at least if we wanted to understand what the world looks like from that perspective. Since we have people killing and dying over there, learning how it looks to the people who live there might be a good thing to do.
It's unsettling to recognize that we don't seem to have a "Free press" over here as much as we have a "Popular Press." Giving mental hand-jobs to consumers is ALWAYS popular. I don't know enough about the Middle East to know if that's what they're also doing, other than their animated cartoons, which, like editorial cartoons here, are definitely opinionated, but if it is, at least their tone of voice is, as I said, more reasoned, less hysterical.
Give it a click.
You want something a little less exotic? Try BBC World News Online. After all, it's from one of our coalition partners (Don't forget Poland .. oops, oh, sorry, they pulled out, pissed off at being lied to about WMD.) It's somewhat sobering to find out how little of the news of the world involves the United States. Oh, except for the stuff where we're shooting people and blowing them up.
posted by Saintperle at
11:54 AM
