Al Jazeera headed to a channel near you...

[Optimus_Prime_]

The english broadcast is either run by or connected to the BBC (I think), which is also great for many of the same reasons.

 

[hippie_hunter]

I don't get to see ANY of their morning programming so I can't really comment on that....most of my viewing has been in primetime. As far as Fox, cannot stomach Hannity, I watch Shepherd Smith, the Five, (sometimes The Factor if I see that O'Reilly is covering something that no one else is....ie: the marine in jail in Mexico...and Red Eye IF I'M STILL UP. Don't watch much else on Fox...I do watch Fox Business News, I followed Gerri Willis from CNN to FBN....CNN gets quite a bit of my time...but these days most of my news is coming from news outlets on the internet.

I love Morning Joe and the Rundown with Chuck Todd. Andrea Mitchell does a great job because she sees herself more as an employee of NBC News as opposed to being an MSNBC commentator. And MSNBC Live is the best general news program out there, better than CNN Newsroom and far superior to Happening Now. Honestly, the only morning/afternoon programs I like on CNN and Fox News are Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room and Shepard Smith's Studio B.

Where MSNBC falters is its utterly horrid primetime lineup. That **** is hard to stomach. Like I said, they make Fox News look subtle with their bias in comparison. Sharpton is a racist *******. Matthews is a tool. Shultz is a buffoon. Maddow is a condescending *****. And O'Donnell is a prick. To their core, all of MSNBC's primetime line up are just horrible people. At least with Fox News, the only primetime host that is on par with the MSNBC pundits is Hannity, the rest are at least tolerable. CNN's primetime line up is actually really damn good, especially that beautiful Erin Burnett.

 

[Kelly]

I love Morning Joe and the Rundown with Chuck Todd. Andrea Mitchell does a great job because she sees herself more as an employee of NBC News as opposed to being an MSNBC commentator. And MSNBC Live is the best general news program out there, better than CNN Newsroom and far superior to Happening Now. Honestly, the only morning/afternoon programs I like on CNN and Fox News are Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room and Shepard Smith's Studio B.

Where MSNBC falters is its utterly horrid primetime lineup. That **** is hard to stomach. Like I said, they make Fox News look subtle with their bias in comparison. Sharpton is a racist *******. Matthews is a tool. Shultz is a buffoon. Maddow is a condescending *****. And O'Donnell is a prick. To their core, all of MSNBC's primetime line up are just horrible people. At least with Fox News, the only primetime host that is on par with the MSNBC pundits is Hannity, the rest are at least tolerable. CNN's primetime line up is actually really damn good, especially that beautiful Erin Burnett.

I like Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper, probably two of my fav on TV today.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

Hillary Clinton loves it.....lol

She called it "real news".

Yeah. It is.

You don't ever hear the name "Kim Kardashian" on there either.

 

[Schlosser85]

I don't get the demonizing of Al Jazeera either, to be honest.

 

[Matt]

For me it is airing decapitations.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

I don't get the demonizing of Al Jazeera either, to be honest.

Like I say, every time I hear it demonized I asked them "do you watch it?" and then I usually get blank stares.

When I started watching I didn't even know the network was controversial, or was controversial in the minds of certain people. So I was surprised when I read anything controversial about it. I think it's Islamophobia. One of my friends thought it was like the Taliban, just because the name "Al Jazeera" sounds Arab and terrorist-y to us.

But if their content is "Arab bias", then what does that make Fox, or most American news? Because we are pretty bad at covering anything related to Muslims, or that violates our delicate sensibilities about us being "good guys".

 

[chamber-music]

I watch Al Jazeera (its been on UK TV for a couple years now) and its fine. Its pretty much like the BBC or CNN to me.

Some of the people who work on Al Jazeera are former BBC people as one of there broadcasting centres are in London.

I don't think they show any beheading stuff on the english language Al Jazeera only the Arabic one. I've never seen any anti-american stuff orso called muslim propaganda either on the english language Al Jazeera shown here in the UK.

It sounds like there is alot of scaremongering going on to be honest. Al Jazeera is far less biased than some of the news channels opperating right now.

 

[Pink Ranger]

I don't think any of my students past or present know about this place....lol

Show them the Superman and Batman forums and say, "This is what you grow up to be when you spend too much time on your computer." Those little buggers will pick up a book faster than you can blink.

 

[Optimus_Prime_]

For me it is airing decapitations.

We show American soldiers bombing cities and civilian areas as if it's something to be proud of.

 

[Lead Cenobite]

I read something about them airing footage of hostages who are forced at gunpoint to plead for their respective governments to withdraw its troops.

 

[Kelly]

Please don't try and crawl up on that high horse Optimus Prime....it does not win any kind of knowledge points, higher ground points, etc. Just really doesn't do much of anything.

Those things do not equate, and never will equate to what these terrorists groups have done.

Yes.."One man's terrorist is another man's hero"...we get it.

 

[enterthemadness]

I'm loyal to Red Eye and RT America so no...-_-

 

[chamber-music]

Time Magazine

Viewpoint: Why Al Jazeera’s Entry into the U.S. Is a Good Thing

Let’s get the cynicism out of the way first. Yes, the takeover of Al Gore’s Current TV by Al Jazeera, a pan-Arab broadcaster headquartered in and funded by the Qatari state, is unlikely to send tremors through the current American media landscape. The revamped “Al Jazeera America” channel—and, yes, it will actually be called that—will have a hard time winning its way into the American mainstream. Current TV, after all, is a fringe player with a small viewership. And some U.S. conservatives, like Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, remain convinced Al Jazeera is anti-American propaganda, a cipher for terrorist-sympathizers and anti-war peaceniks. Others simply doubt the ability of an international news channel to spark interest in the U.S.

Writing in the Guardian, American media critic Michael Wolff dismissed Al Jazeera English—the broadcaster’s international challenge to the BBC and CNN—as “so boring that there is no real reason to be hostile to it.”

But there are real reasons to welcome Al Jazeera’s $500 million entry into tens of millions of American households. The main one is that, contrary to what Wolff and O’Reilly think, Al Jazeera English (I’m in less of a position to judge its more controversial Arabic counterpart) is a very good news network. It’s sober, thoughtful and, flush with Qatar’s petro-wealth, capable of devoting resources to stories other major news channels now eschew; few international networks cover Latin America and Africa, let alone the Middle East, with more authority and depth than Al Jazeera.

Its journalists hail from some 50 countries, making it one of the most cosmopolitan enterprises in the news business. What Wolff deems “boring” has been praised by other prominent Americans as “real news.” Colin Powell apparently told Al Gore that it’s the only channel he watches. And here’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011:

You may not agree with [Al Jazeera English], but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads, and the kind of stuff that we do on our news. Which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.
​

Yes, critics are right to point to the network’s paymaster—a government whose political agenda has, at times, directly influenced its coverage. The channel, for example, has been one of the most avid watchers of the Syrian conflict (Qatar is known to be arming and funding factions of the Syrian rebellion), but was relatively quiet about Arab Spring unrest in the nearby Kingdom of Bahrain, a close Gulf state ally of Doha. But mainstream American networks are also susceptible to external political pressures. And while Al Jazeera presents the news sometimes with a discernible bias, it lacks the partisan shrillness of channels glued to the Beltway like MSNBC and Fox News.

In 2011, as Al Jazeera received plaudits for its unmatched coverage of the Arab Spring, I spoke with Abderrahim Foukara, the network’s Washington bureau chief. He rejected the much-vaunted (largely American) notion of “objective” journalism and outlined what Al Jazeera English seeks to do instead:

It’s focused on all parts of the world and therefore it has an eye on all sorts of different audiences. That’s what gives it its unique identity. Of course, from one crisis to another you adjust the focus — but the idea is that you’re actually catering to all different parts of the world. There’s a belief that we live in a global village, but a global village where until very recently information came down from the global north to the south. But now you’ve a channel that tries to reverse that movement from the south to the north.

There’s also an awareness that we live in a world that is increasingly characterized by people’s wishes to live in free and democratic systems. The notion is that you have to focus on people’s grievances and aspirations — because these are the people who are watching you — and if those people themselves are increasingly imbued with a certain skepticism of government, well that has to reflect in a channel like Al Jazeera English.
​

It’s that impulse, combined with Al Jazeera’s terrific production values and recent record of award-winning documentary journalism, that could very well animate the nascent Al Jazeera America network. There’s cause to believe that Al Jazeera America may better speak to the demographics of the 21st century U.S.—championing minorities, inner cities and youth issues. Americans hungry for a change from the usual may start tuning in.
Even if it never achieves top ratings in the U.S., Al Jazeera has in many senses already stolen a march on mainstream American competitors. For example, Al Jazeera English’s Washington-based social media news show “The Stream” is the progenitor of other internet broadcasts such as HuffPost Live that may well become the norm in the decades to come.

Yesterday, as detractors elsewhere bloviated over Al Jazeera’s mythical terrorist ties, The Stream hosted famous epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. The show’s anchors quizzed him on systems of governance and the political dysfunction behind the fiscal cliff with the help of myriad viewers who joined in via a Google hangout or on Twitter. Questions came from a remote town in western Texas, New York City and many places in between. Al Jazeera knows that there’s already an American audience for a serious news network that manages to be at once both local and global. And it also knows there’s no other major American news network capable of matching that feat.

 

[Zatanna]

They have a right to air but I also have the right to never watch it.

Exactly. Nothing more needs to be said from me.

 

[regwec]

I watch Al Jazeera (its been on UK TV for a couple years now) and its fine. Its pretty much like the BBC or CNN to me.

I agree with this. It seems no worse/more slanted/poorly researched than other rolling news services. I find the Kremlin propaganda channel "Russia Today" to be more troubling.

 

[Midnyte_Sun]

Al Jazeera's format has been "World News" but in the US Cable news market, I wonder if they will adapt and start showing celebrity gossip and missing children scandals. I hope not.

 

[enterthemadness]

I agree with this. It seems no worse/more slanted/poorly researched than other rolling news services. I find the Kremlin propaganda channel "Russia Today" to be more troubling.

I love me some Russia....Today. Of course, they give 3rd parties air time at times and oh yea, report on conspiracies...so of course I love them. Now where is my tin foil hat...

 

[Hypestyle]

hopefully they will announce soon when new jobs will be available..

 

[hippie_hunter]

Al Jazeera's format has been "World News" but in the US Cable news market, I wonder if they will adapt and start showing celebrity gossip and missing children scandals. I hope not.

I doubt it. BBC World News hasn't changed with the introduction of BBC America.

 

[Kelly]

From what I can tell, there will be none of Current TV's people rolled over into the deal, so hopefully it will be pure news, and in pure....no political agenda.

 

[Paradoxium]

If I watch the occasional mainstream news nowadays, I stream it from Livestation (free). I bet more people are doing that anyways.

 

[Marvolo]

For me it is airing decapitations.

Those decapitatjons were on the internet as well. We still use it. Personally I dont think news should be censored because truth shouldnt be censored. You show it all even the ugly stuff regardless of what it is. Yes, I understsnd the impact on the families and I agree that there should be a period of 24-48 to notify family so they dont find out by flipping on the news but beyond that the news should have free reign to report anything backed up by credible sources.

 

[Schlosser85]

I don't think the news needs to show people being decapitated.

What's the value of it? What have we learned?

 

[regwec]

Little. But, as with the Abu Ghraib scandal, I do think it is valuable for the evidence to be in the public domain. I would not say the same about every crime, but I do think that the illegal and inhumane acts committed in the name of a political cause should be brought to the public's attention.