Friday, April 15
Control Room
dir. Jehane Noujaim, Egypt/USA 2003

Ted Turner's CNN dominated the first Gulf war, but for the second the bragging rights went to the Qatar-based satellite news channel al-Jazeera (the name means "the island", i.e. the Arabian peninsula), making its reputation with sensationally influential anti-American coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

This fly-on-the-wall documentary by Jehane Noujaim shows the al-J team's life at the US military media centre, cheek-by-jowl with Fox News and the BBC, and demonstrates the channel's successes and terrible failures.

Noujaim shows how the Bush administration was astonished to find that despite its massive military superiority, America was evenly matched on the media playing field with al-Jazeera, which repeatedly ran images of civilian casualties. The most telling moments in this film, however, are those exposing al-Jazeera's catastrophic weaknesses. Despite preening itself on speaking to the whole Arab world, the station is remarkably incurious about why other Arab nations did not rush to help Saddam. For all its emotional montages, it failed to tell its viewers how badly Iraq's defence was going, like Arab media coverage that misread the Six Day war.

An interesting companion piece to Fahrenheit 9/11.
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian