Intrinsitivity

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the documentary film entitled Control Room. It includes a summary of the show, a brief history of the Al Jazeera news network, a discussion of themes addressed in the film, and personal observations or, as I label them, controlled ruminations.

Table of Contents

1. Show Summary
2. Al Jazeera
3. Themes Addressed
4. Controlled Ruminations
5. References

Show Summary

Control Room is a documentary film that explores two opposing perspectives of journalism as revealed through commentary on news coverage of the 2003 Iraq War. (Internet, 2006b) Its tagline is, “Different channels. Different truths.” (Internet, 2006a) Most commentary is given by employees of Al Jazeera, “the Arab world’s most popular news outlet,” and employees of Western news agencies, like CNN, NBC, and the BBC. (Internet, 2006b)

News from Western agencies is depicted in this film as information that is constantly filtered through the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), the U.S. military’s central command and intelligence unit during this war. (United, 2006) Thus, the struggle between Al Jazeera and Western news agencies is seen as being fought between Al Jazeera’s attempt at unbiased war coverage and what are effectively mouthpieces of the U.S. military, which, according to former American Lieutenant Josh Rushing, are themselves mouthpieces of pro-American viewer demand. (Ibrahim, 2005)

Among what the Internet Movie Database oddly but understandably labels as the “cast,” there are a number of intriguing “characters” or members in this film. These include Samir Khader, Al Jazeera’s senior producer, the aforementioned former Lt. Josh Rushing, and Deema Khatib, another producer and, incidentally, the only female among those who voice a substantial amount of opinionated commentary. (United, 2006a; Control, 2006) Khader is seen throughout the film as an outspoken critic of the U.S. military’s presence in Iraq, their attempt to filter news of ongoing war events, and their excuses for their seemingly selfish actions.

The main U.S. military figure and most outspoken American in the film is former Lt. Josh Rushing. Rushing is often seen debating media bias and taking what I consider to be a relatively moderate and measured stance on most issues. In fact, he is often heard weighing more than one side of an argument, rather than blindly defending the Western media or the U.S. Military, as one might expect from U.S. military personnel. Rushing quit military service after being criticized by the Pentagon for his comments in the film. (Josh, 2006)

Al Jazeera producer Deema Khatib also comments n Control Room, boldly expressing her opinions about the Iraq war. She and other interviewees are routinely heard defending Al Jazeera’s approach to media coverage as unbiased and informative, in contradistinction to the Western—and, mostly, American—approach wherein evidence of carnage is never televised so as, it is argued by Lt. Rushing, to shelter a highly influential audience. Toward the end of the film, Deema is also heard criticizing the Iraqi people’s unwillingness to take defensive action against foreign and domestic oppression as exemplified through their—and her, she admits—vocal opposition during the day and passive nonresistance at night.

Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera began is “an Arabic-language television network based in Doha, Qatar,” which began broadcasting in 1996 and boasts 50 million viewers. (Al Jazeera, 2006a) In addition to news coverage, Al Jazeera hosts several popular shows, including Al Jazeera Sports, a sports channel, Al Jazeera Live, a live conference channel, an English-language channel, Al Jazeera Children’s Channel, and, finally, Al Jazeera International, “the world’s first English-language news channel to be headquartered in the Middle East.” (Al Jazeera, 2006a; Al Jazeera, 2006b)

Themes Addressed

Control Room addresses several important issues, including military propaganda, media objectivity, and the U.S. military’s war objective. Military propaganda is addressed in the form of verbal disputes fought between Al Jazeera employees, like Samir Khader, and American military representatives, like Lt. Rushing. These disputes focus on the U.S. military’s role in influencing the perceptions of American and, because of its reach, international audiences about the Iraq war. Khader argues, for instance, that American war coverage omits gruesome details, like shots of dead American soldiers, while Rushing tends, at least in the beginning, to defend this bias by appealing to the American media’s capitalistic purse strings, as it were. Khader’s response to Rushing’s explanation is not shown, but one imagines disagreement based on subsequent opinion from him.

Media objectivity is another issue the scope of which includes military propaganda in that the latter prevents realization of the former and, as just discussed, is viewed by Al Jazeera employees as a serious perceptual problem. However, Rushing is also heard accusing Al Jazeera of biased war coverage and this accusation faintly echoes a much harsher critique recorded by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a U.S. press conference given sometime between 2003 and 2004. Rumsfeld and others in Washington are widely known for labeling Al Jazeera “a mouthpiece for Islamist extremists.” (Khaleej, 2006)

A third important issue addressed in Control Room is the U.S. military’s war objective. This objective is questioned by Al Jazeera employees in several ways. First, to repeat, there is an accusation that CENTCOM is not interested in ensuring the disclosure of truth, but, rather, in spinning events in a warm nationalistic light. Al Jazeera employees see CENTCOM as not only coloring the truth, in other words, but as also distorting it out of all recognizable proportion.

Another suspicious observation Al Jazeera employees make about the war objective is that Iraqi citizens do not seem nearly as enthusiastic, and, sometimes, plainly unenthusiastic, by the ubiquitous Western military presence lingering in their country. From watching interviews with Iraqi citizens, it appears that many are passionately opposed to this presence and are desperately pleading to have their lives return to “normal” as experienced during the universally branded despotic rule of its former leader, Saddam Hussein. Considering that Hussein has now been condemned by an interim Iraqi court to death by hanging, choosing such a leader over foreign military occupation will perhaps send a strong message to future viewers of this film. (Trial, 2006)

Controlled Ruminations

This concluding section I call Controlled Ruminations. It contains two personal observations about this film and is phrased to indicate that I am making a concerted effort to maintain a logical level of discourse, so as to not add unnecessary emotional baggage. I admit, like most Iraq war commentators, to have strong opinions about this war and to also not feel completely at ease airing these opinions, since personal experience suggests that deeply emotional opinions can be, or become over time with new information, unreasonable and in need of revision.

That said, here are my two observations. The first stems from a comment made by Lt. Rushing in an interview during this film. He is heard to say in one segment, “The audience shapes the medium.” (Salama, 2004) A similar but more revealing statement can be found from a 2005 chat transcript hosted at washingtonpost.com in which Rushing wrote, “It’s my position that the audience shapes the medium and eventually the message. FOX is what it is because enough viewers/consumers want it the way it is.” (Ibrahim, 2005)

The former, and especially the latter, quote suggest that Lt. Rushing is familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement to the same effect. McLuhan’s statement was not meant to be interpreted as referring solely to news media or even, as I understand it, broadcast media or journalism in general. However, it seems to me that the core idea applies to Rushing’s interpretation of it.

Assuming it does, my first observation is that I find Rushing’s to be partially correct. This of course makes it partially incorrect or false. I consider it false because Rushing falsely assumes that the U.S. media companies exist to serve the interests of their American audiences. I worked for a branch of the largest privately held media company in the U.S. from 2000 to 2002 and my experience has been that U.S. media companies, or at least the one I represented, care far more for advertising revenue than audience viewership and readership ratings.

To be sure, viewership and readership are vital concerns in deciding what content to provide paying customers. At the same time, as successful Internet revenue models prove, much content is now free or very inexpensive, a fact which significantly increases the importance of ad revenue and, therefore, approval from large companies that can afford to spend thousands or millions of dollars in advertising. Thus, were I to pin blame, it would most likely be pinned on corporations whose advertising dollars effectively pay the salaries of media executives.

The second observation I would like to make concerns a broader assumption made by most interviewees in this film, which is that broadcast media should remain unbiased. I do not mean to express this opinion in such a way that I lose all semblance of meaning in forming it by postmodernistically questioning the logic of that very formation, but it seems to me that all information communicated by humans is subject to subjectivity as we normally understand the term and that we cannot, therefore, assume that broadcast media will be unbiased in the sense that it escapes the natural limitations of human knowledge and sensibility. In short, I see no reason to suppose that any news story has an angle, where “angle” refers to a political or economic set of opinions undergirding the story’s presentation.

References

Al Jazeera. (2006a, November 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 7, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Al_Jazeera&oldid=86268732.

Al Jazeera International. (2006b, November 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 7, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Al_Jazeera_International&oldid=86209272.

Control Room. (2006, October 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 7, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_Room&oldid=82445015.

Ibrahim, H., & Rushing, J. (2005, January 24). Film: Control Room. The Washington Post Company. Retrieved November 12, 2006, from http://www.washingpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27078-2005Jan21.html.

Internet Movie Database Inc. (2006a). Control Room (2004). Retrieved November 5, 2006, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0391024/combined.

Internet Movie Database Inc. (2006b). Plot Summary for Control Room (2004). Retrieved November 5, 2006, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0391024/plotsummary.

Josh Rushing. (2006, October 29). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 13, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Josh_Rushing&oldid=84434652.

Khaleej Times Online. (2006). Al Jazeera ready to expand as it turns 10. Retrieved November 7, 2006, from http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2006/October/
middleeast_October515.xml&section=middleeast.

Salama, H., & Varela, R. (Producers), & Noujaim, J. (Director). (2004). Control Room [Motion Picture].
United States: Magnolia Pictures.

Trial of Saddam Hussein. (2006). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 13, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trial_of_Saddam_Hussein&oldid=87162320.

United States Central Command. (2006, October 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 5, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_States_Central_Command&oldid=84178821.

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