Control Room

I watched the documentary Control Room tonight. It's about Al Jazeera. Specifically, it takes place during the Iraq War (March - May 2003) and is a collection of interviews with employees of Al Jazeera as well as other pressand US military media relations officers in Qatar. The interviews are interleaved with relevant video clips from Al Jazeera (and related news footage).

It had a less context than I expected, since it was focused solely on those few weeks. Also, it was a little more "raw" than I expected. There is no narrator tying the segements together or asking questions and the "interviews" seemed ad hoc - people talking during a smoke break or while they were driving somewhere. I liked the candid feel that came from the footage that was shot while the events where in progress though.

Overall, it definitely illustrated the different perspective that the Al Jazeera journalists (and, by extension, their audience) have. Perhaps one of the more striking perspectives was the contrasting views of integrity of the US government about Al Jazeera and vice versa. Near the middle of the film, there is a clip of Donald Rumsfeld criticizing Al Jazeera. Rumsfeld says that Al Jazeera gathers children and tells them to go and play in a bomb crater, so Al Jazeera can film it - giving the impression that the US is bombing civilians. (And a germane news clip follows). Near the end of the film, one of the Al Jazeera journalists says that the US military setup the scene were Iraqis parade around the square in Baghdad while the statue of Saddam is toppled. He says that he used to live in Iraqi and the "Iraqis" in the square don't really looks like Iraqis, they don't speak like Iraqis, etc. In his view, if the scene was genuine then there would be more people in the square and their ages, genders, etc. would be more diverse (than the handful of young males that were present). The two positions could not be more ironic. I suppose that divergence of opinions helps to explain the current state of the World.

If you're into the whole documentary thing or media/politics than it's worth a view. (On the other hand, if you're not into that then you'd probably find it a little boring).