War through Al Jazeera’s eyes

It has been described by the U.S. government as “the mouthpiece of Osama bin Laden.” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has called its reports “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”

The subject of this invective is Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news station that serves some 40 million viewers, most of them in the Middle East. The name means “island” -- an island, as one of the station’s correspondents puts it, “in a sea of nonsense” (i.e., state-run news).

Depending on your point of view, Al Jazeera reflects Arab opinion, shapes it, or is an honest, independent broker of news.

“We’ve been accused of being a mouthpiece for Yasser Arafat, a mouthpiece for the Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency], a mouthpiece for the Americans, a mouthpiece for Bin Laden, a mouthpiece for Saddam, and a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime,” says Al Jazeera journalist Hassan Ibrahim, who points out that one of the station’s journalists was arrested and tortured by the Sudanese.

“I think the main thing about Al Jazeera is that it doesn’t check its facts,” says Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Gareth Bayley, speaking from Baghdad. “They’ve made allegations that Marines were dismembering women and attacking children. Whenever there’s an attack [by the insurgency], it’s called ‘resistance.’ They use loaded terminology. So does everybody else, but they do it on several orders of magnitude.”

Now comes a perspective from inside Al Jazeera, Jehane Noujaim’s “Control Room,” a documentary that goes behind the scenes of the station’s coverage of the invasion of Iraq a year ago. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and will be released Friday, follows Ibrahim, senior producer Sameer Khader and Central Command press officer Lt. Josh Rushing as they grapple with information coming out of Iraq: the invasion itself, the fall of Baghdad, the killing of an Al Jazeera journalist by an American airstrike and the looting that occurred in the aftermath of the war. At the time, Al Jazeera’s reporting on all of this was news itself. As Noujaim sees it, there’s an irony in that.

“Nobody in the United States, the freest, most open country in the world, knows anything about Al Jazeera,” she says. “Here Al Jazeera is about freedom of the press, the United States is trying to create freedom of the press and democracy in the Arab world, and they’re heavily criticizing Al Jazeera. I thought the whole thing was an intriguing story and a set of contradictions that would be interesting to look into.”

Noujaim seems ideally placed to do just that. An Egyptian American, she was raised in Cairo and went to Harvard, where she graduated in visual arts and philosophy. She directed a documentary, “Mokattam,” about an Egyptian garbage-collecting village, worked for MTV News as a documentary producer, and directed “Startup.com,” a celebrated documentary about the rise and fall of an Internet firm. It was while visiting friends and family in Cairo and then revisiting the garbage-collecting village that she first thought of documenting Al Jazeera, which began broadcasting in 1996 and is supported by the Qatar government.

“They literally had no money to pay the rent,” Noujaim says of the village people who collect garbage. “The next month they had pooled together their resources to buy a satellite dish. I had filmed women who would pick up pieces of newspaper from the garbage in order to educate themselves on what was going on in the world. All of sudden these same women had access to satellite TV, speeches from the U.S., Israeli officials, Arab officials. And also debates -- once you start seeing debates on TV like that, it kind of opens up the possibility for debate within your own community.”

‘A very determined woman’

While this sort of anthropology is interesting, Noujaim recognized it wasn’t sexy enough to interest potential distributors. The looming war, however, gave her the perfect pretext to profile a station that was reaching the same people, in a sense, that the invasion was trying to reach.

Getting inside was not easy, however. Noujaim flew to Doha, Qatar, on her own nickel, put herself up in a hotel in the Pakistani part of town (while Western network correspondents stayed at the Ritz at $300 a night), and began knocking on doors. Al Jazeera was not interested, however -- in fact, it had turned down other media outlets that had also recognized the station’s newsworthiness. It wasn’t a matter of trust but of logistics. The station didn’t want huge camera crews cluttering its efforts to prepare for the war. Noujaim did manage to land a cafeteria meeting with the station manager, and it was here that she bumped into Ibrahim.

“I realized that this was a very determined woman who had the guts to come all that way to do something very amazing,” Ibrahim says. “I believed in her because she wasn’t just doing something about Jazeera. She was doing something about the whole coverage of the war, the misconceptions. We worked around Jazeera’s refusal, so we had access to certain parts of Jazeera.”

One of the off-limits areas was the newsroom, although Noujaim eventually was able to film there as well. Unlike her larger rivals, she proved to the station that she could be invisible, working with a digital camera, using available lighting, and employing at most one other crewman. She also managed to earn the trust of other Al Jazeera employees, notably producer Khader, a thoughtful man who is critical of the American administration but also says he will send his two children to the States to college.

The same ambivalence is displayed by Ibrahim, who was born in England (his parents are Sudanese), was raised in Sudan, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia (where his high school classmate was Bin Laden), went to the University of Arizona at Tucson (where he became a certified Deadhead), and worked for the BBC. Like Khader, he admires the American system of government but disagrees with the people running it.

Ibrahim insists that such attitudes are not required of Al Jazeera employees. “If you are a professional journalist, you can do the job,” he says. “In the interview, you are not asked about your ideological background. All that you are asked is ‘Are you willing to work in an environment where you are compelled to tell a story even if it hurts you or is against what you believe in?’ We don’t hide that we have biased journalists and ideologues and people who would call for the destruction of Israel and people who adore Ariel Sharon and people who adore Bin Laden and people who would love to kill the man.”

Noujaim was rarely able to elicit such candor from Western journalists. She said the firing of MSNBC correspondent Peter Arnett for giving an interview to Iraqi television in which he called the coalition attacks a failure had a chilling effect on network correspondents. She also says Western reporters signed agreements with their employers not to air their personal views of what they’d seen. Even their professional views were heavily edited. Noujaim says a photographer for Associated Press told her that graphic images of the war’s victims were routinely excised.

Ironically, the most open-minded and forthright voice on the Western side was that of Lt. Rush, who says, for example, that Al Jazeera is nationalistic in the same way that the Fox News Channel is. Bayley scoffs at this comparison (though Noujaim also thinks it’s apt). He adds that only 26% of Iraqis approve of the station because it is perceived as sowing discord.

Still in the hot seat

Obviously, the guidelines about war coverage since the invasion and early occupation have changed. Pictures of flag-draped coffins have appeared in American newspapers, photos of the dead scroll across American television screens, and images of American personnel tormenting Iraqi POWs in Abu Ghraib prison have been shown both in newspapers and on TV.

Despite these Al Jazeera-like images appearing here, the station remains on the hot seat for its reporting. During the war, there was talk (unproven) that it had been infiltrated by Iraqi agents. Now it’s being accused of collaborating with the insurgency and inciting violence against coalition forces. The managing editor, who appears in the film, was fired, some say for his ties to Iraq, others because of U.S. displeasure with the station for showing American POWs. Last November, two employees were reportedly detained by American forces and sent to Abu Ghraib, where they were sexually humiliated in much the same way Iraqi POWs were. Of Al Jazeera’s coverage, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell recently said, “We [the U.S. and Qatar] are having very intense discussions about this subject.”

All of this contentiousness dramatizes the importance media coverage has assumed in the battle for hearts and minds in the Middle East. So where does Al Jazeera really stand in this battle? As “Control Room” demonstrates, it has one foot in Western-style journalism and the other in the history, politics and culture of the region, a posture that is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

“Look, who would you rather hear the news from?” Noujaim says. “Somebody who has been living in the Middle East or somebody who’s lived in Arkansas their whole life? I think there is a definite opinion of people who work at Al Jazeera. For the most part they were against the war. Their Iraqi translator was sitting there translating Bush directly. We hear ‘to free the Iraqi people,’ and five minutes later he’s making a phone call home and finding out that members of his family had been hurt in the war. How do you not get emotional about something like that?”