Al jazeera & Americans......

Long have I whinged over America's absence of any serious TV broadcast of international news. Non-Americans may find this strange as they can tune into CNN International and receive world-wide news almost on demand. The problem is, CNN International is not broadcast in America.

 

 

Instead, CNN offers predigested news items over heavily scripted broadcasts focusing mainly on what's happening in America. Annoyingly burdened with frequent commercials, CNN also provides nightly interview programs hosted by the likes of Piers Morgan and morning news specials hosted by the hyperactive and constantly switched-on Soledad O'Brien.

 

At other times, CNN America indulges its audience with daily pundit panels covering domestic events and typified by lack of depth, misinformation, and worst of all, boredom. Some of the misinformation comes from breaking news stories before the basic who, what, when, where and why of the item is clear. Such stories initially depend upon on eye witness sources for an accounting of events.

 

The several full days CNN spent on the recent Sandy Hook school Shooting in Newtown, Connecticut is an example of consistently getting facts wrong that were supplied by locals. In addition, CNN puts its own liberal spin on most of what it scripts and broadcasts. Seldom does CNN America offer any programming that cannot be understood by a middle-school level student. In another vein, American middle school students have nowhere near the understanding of world events than their counterparts in other developed countries.

 

Enter a first-class, serious, energetic and dedicated international news resource; al Jazeera.

 

Their recent effort to establish themselves as a cable news network has fallen flat owing to American prejudice. Namely, al Jazeera is thought to be pro-Arab, especially in its Arabic broadcasts. Never mind a short, but indicative history of event reporting that is truly international, intelligent, insightful, well presented and professionally reported. It is the latter that this Qatar government-owned satellite broadcast enterprise is attempting to sell to those Americans responsible for licensing cable TV.

 

In spite of its record for excellence, al Jazeera is finding it very difficult to break into the American TV media scene as a player. Having just purchased former Vice-President Al Gores small and unsuccessful satellite TV company, Current TV, al Jazeera hopes to expand the organization into a top ranking competitor to CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, another satellite newscaster owned by the NBC network.

 

No sooner was the deal between Current TV and al Jazeera announced than America's second largest cable telecommunications company, Time Warner Cable, expelled Current TV from its stable of broadcast organizations, thus depriving al Jazeera of Time Warner's large subscriber audience amounting about 12 million households.

 

Although there are other outlets for what is expected to be named, Al Jazeera America, this setback illustrates America's visceral distrust if not antipathy for an Arab-owned newscast company operating in the USA. Subsequent to Time Warner's dropping Current TV, it announced that it would keep the door open for Al Jazeera America to operate within its group.

 

These actions by Time Warner illustrate America's self-imposed isolation in the broadcast industry. In effect, American citizens are being deprived of access to meaningful, if not slanted, world news by prejudice, politics and, worst of all, public opinion. Indeed, public opinion dictates all broadcast activity because the public ultimately decides what it wants to watch. And what the public wants to watch is meticulously measured and published as ratings.

 

Just now, the Fox News company is enjoying high ratings while CNN and MSNBC are not. Efforts to increase ratings include almost anything other than the unbiased reporting of international news. For example, CNN enjoyed an evening of high ratings during its coverage of New Year's eve celebrations in New York's Times Square.

 

This spike was attributed by some to the presenters, Anderson Cooper of CNN and Kathy Griffiths, an off color commedienne, who put on what some considered a sex show. What's even more interesting is that both are gay.

 

Therein lies an important clue to the entire issue of informative versus popular news, versus anything else that happens to be on TV at any given time. For the most part, the public will tune into the most inane and spicy program available.

 

It is doubtful that the USA has a monopoly on this tendency. But that is no excuse for being deprived of complex and in-depth access to world events. Part of a broadcast organizations charter should be the social obligation to inform and educate the public in as unbiased a fashion as possible.

 

Time was, when the States had a pretty good record of achieving this objective, e.g. during the Walter Cronkite era. Today, spin and bias is the name of the game while outlets like MSNBC, CNN and Fox News have taken strong political positions of left, center-left and right respectively.

 

It is likely that even if Al Jazeera America is allowed into the fold, America's news programming will remain flat, biased, and shallow. After all, Al Jazeera America will eventually succumb to the struggle for high ratings and everyone knows what that means.