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42

GEORGE ROBINSON

Special to the Jewish News

27925 Orchard Lake Road, north of 11 Mile • Farmington Hills

6/18
2004

"Control Room" offers a bird's-eye view of the
influential Arab cable network and a lesson in
journalistic objectivity.

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he first image we see in
Control Room, a new docu-
mentary by Jehane Noujaim,
is a burning red sun rising next to a
satellite dish — the cliched view of the
sun-drenched Middle East and
the encroaching technology
of the globalized world in
which it sits. This juxtaposi-
tion serves as an instant introduc-
tion to the world of Al-Jazeerah, the
Arab cable news network that is the
subject of the film.
Control Room, which is scheduled to
open Friday, June 18, at the Maple Art
Theatre in Bloomfield Township, is a
balanced portrait of the staff of Al-
Jazeerah in the first months of the cur-
rent war in Iraq, crisply made and fre-
quently funny.
The staff at Al-Jazeerah is, like the
staff at newsrooms everywhere, educat-
ed and hyper-articulate, underpaid,
overworked and on deadline. The core
members of the on-air personnel are
veterans of the BBC's defunct Arabic
television division and, although they
are frequently accused of behaving
otherwise, they express an undying
admiration for and commitment to
the Beeb's ethos of fairness and bal-
ance.
"We were founded to educate the
Arab masses about ... democracy and
the other point of view'," says Sarn.ir
Khader, a senior producer at the net-
work. "Our goal is to shake up the
rigid societies of the Arab world."
Yet the staff, both on-air and pro-
duction people, make no bones about
their commitment to an Arab point of
view. Of course, as several American
and British journalists point out dur-
ing the course of the film, in that
respect they do not differ from any of
their colleagues from the U.S. or the
U.K.
As a State Department spokesman
notes, "That's their audience," just as
Fox's "fair and balanced" coverage is
heavily skewed to a particular
American point of view.

What makes Control Room so com-
pelling to watch at this juncture in
history is that it represents a remark-
ably honest attempt to get beyond the
journalistic rhetoric of objectivity" in
order to examine the deeper reality,
which is that every journalist brings a
viewpoint to a story and to a beat.
The good ones acknowledge
that viewpoint to themselves
and strive to present bal-
anced coverage of a story. But
• objectivity is a chimera.
Human beings are not lab rats and
they do not function under controlled
conditions. As a consequence,
reporters are faced with the messiness
of daily life in situations of conflict, of
contradictory evidence, competing
agendas and their own emotions, not
to mention the pressures of competi-
tion and deadline pressure.
As one American correspondent says
in the film, "Are any American jour-
nalists objective about the war?"
So it comes as a refreshing surprise
to hear the frankness with which
Khader acknowledges that his concern
for the Arab world drives his news
judgment. Any producer or editor
who claims otherwise is lying to him-
self or his readers/viewers.
At the same time, Al-Jazeerah has
been plenty eager to ruffle Arab feath-
ers, which the film makes abundantly
clear. Hassan Ibrahim, a Sudanese
journalist and former head of the BBC
Arab News service, now on the air
with Al-Jazeerah, is utterly frank about

Al-Jazeera producer Deema Khatib,
as seen in the documentary "Control
Room"

