from Hacker News

Al Jazeera English: The Most Hated Name in News

by golwengaud on 4/29/10, 9:16 PM with 55 comments

• by Avshalom on 4/30/10, 1:27 AM

  I started watching Al Jazeera a few years back because they were the only news network with a live web broadcast ( http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/# ) when I didn't have cable. I pretty much fell in love with it for everything the article points out.

  Great journalism, and journalists every where, actual journalists instead of celebrity talking heads. Debates are two people debating instead of yelling. They also don't have that Fox/CNN approach of going out of their way to portray both sides of every story as equal.

  The documentaries are top notch too.

  I wish I had more to add to the article, other than to say that I hope it does make good inroads to NA without changing.

• by barrkel on 4/30/10, 2:43 AM

  I found this disturbing:

  "On Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, meanwhile, Sami al-Hajj, a rookie cameraman with the station, was captured in what he believes was a case of mistaken identity (another cameraman named Sami had filmed an interview with bin Laden); he spent six years in Guantánamo before being released in 2008. The forty-year-old Sudanese national, who now walks like an old man, told me he was interrogated more than 300 times -- almost exclusively about Al Jazeera, on whom he was asked to spy."

• by rdtsc on 4/30/10, 2:21 AM

  From the article (quoting Philip Seib):

  ---

  Comparing it with the American networks "is like comparing The Economist to Newsweek."

  ---

  That's how I see it pretty much. I had accidentally stumbled on Al Jazeera English while channel surfing. Somehow I had always thought they were some shady, terrorist supported news outlet. I very much surprised at the quality of reporting and investigative journalism. They covered issues that actually matter in the world as opposed to "Tiger Woods has been thinking about a public apology" type crap or "Be afraid of killer fungus from outer space that eats your children" type stuff.

  At the same time I don't know why CNN and other American network report junk. Don't they simply report what American public wants to see and hear? Isn't that a commentary on the quality of American viewers? They are in the business of selling the audience to the advertisers.

• by andyjdavis on 4/30/10, 7:35 AM

  I found Al Jazeera was unusual in that after watching it for any length of time I actually felt more knowledgeable for it. In particular their programmes like "Empire" were always educational.

  Take this for example. http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/empire/2009/11/20091...

  Watching other news stations rarely makes me feel like I've learnt anything. Too many fluff pieces and too many short stories that quickly relay what happened but give you little insight into why. There was a bombing here, there was an accident there, this happened over here, thankyou for watching. Its all reporting and no analysis.

• by tokenadult on 4/30/10, 2:15 AM

  It depends on which circles you run in what is the most hated name in news. Among many people I know, that would be Fox News. For at least some, it would be one of the major United States broadcast networks, e.g. CBS or NBC.

• by simc on 4/30/10, 12:43 AM

  I watch Al Jazeera English sometimes and IMHO it is better than CNN International and nearly as good as BBC World.

• by ivenkys on 4/30/10, 7:43 AM

  Al Jazeera and BBC are by far the top two news organisations in the world.

  The one common thing they have - independent funding, AJ funded by an oil sheikh and the BBC by the British public. May be that's the way forward , instead of citizen journalism we need citizen funding for news.

• by jackfoxy on 4/30/10, 2:07 AM

  "After years of sacrificing qualified reporting staff to the bottom line, and substituting public relations (press releases barely rewritten, press conferences reported verbatim) for costly investigative journalism, the media corporations that, starting in the ’90s, convinced regulators that consolidation was essential to their survival have found themselves with little immunity against the financial crisis."

  Boy does that ever qualify as a run-on sentence! But it does hit a lot of the points of what's gone wrong with journalism. I have noticed media-criticism is a popular past time on HN.

• by sekou on 4/30/10, 7:17 AM

  "And what of the assumption that everyone with access to the Internet or a camera phone will fill the gap? "Citizen journalism," he says, "is like citizen dentistry." Without trained journalists expending the time and resources to find out what is going on, the risk in places such as the United States -- where the news can seem like an endless lunatic carnival in which the outside world doesn’t exist -- is not only of becoming cut off from reality and developing skewed perceptions."

  CNN needs to realize that broadcasting random tweets helps no one.

• by RK on 4/30/10, 12:14 AM

  I watch Worldfocus sometimes on PBS and they run Al Jazeera English reports all of the time.

  Edit: Looks like Worldfocus stopped airing as of April 2, 2010.

• by pavs on 4/30/10, 5:57 AM

  I don't see a single ad on Al Jazeera english website. How do they survive? I know it is funded by a rich seikh.

• by s3graham on 4/30/10, 5:06 AM

  It's totally silly, but I love hearing the accents change with each story.

• by ars on 4/30/10, 7:29 AM

  It looks like the only way to have good journalism these days is if it's paid out of someones private pocket.

  People are assuming American news is bad because of some maliciousness, or incompetence, but actually it seems they just don't have the money.

  Anyone know an American Billionaire who might be willing to start (or fund) a news network? Maybe Warren Buffett?