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Control Room
Jul. 2nd, 2004 10:48 amSo I went with a bunch of people to see Control Room last night. Due to exhaustion, I couldn't stick around for post-movie discussion, but I wish I'd been able to. It's a very thought-provoking movie. Here's some provoked thoughts.
It was an oddly familiar movie in one way. Over the last 20 years or so in anthropology (my former calling), the discipline has had to face the existence of native anthropologists, or people of a given culture doing their own ethnography. The party line in anthropology, of course, is that you have to be an outside observer to be objective about what you are seeing, and so these native anthropologists were treated with a great deal of skepticism (or with outright hostility or a patronizing form of postcolonial racism in which it was admitted that yes, everybody was biased, but Westerners have a better bias so it's okay). These native anthropologists in turn asked what made the non-native observers think they were so objective, when their work was obviously, to the natives, filled with all kinds of biases. This kind of debate can easily descend into postmodern navel-gazing, but when you are talking about real people's lives and ways of being, it is a very important issue to confront.
So I saw this anthropological debate reflected very clearly in the discussions in Control Room about journalism and objectivity and standards. The Al Jazeera crew had no trouble admitting they were biased in favor of Arab interests--it was their default starting position. However, like those native anthropologists, they insisted that their observations and reporting had as much validity as that of Western journalists, and in fact Al Jazeera was necessary to provide balance. They made their case pretty convincingly, and it seemed as though by the end of the filming that even the US Army Media Specialist (or whatever his title was, Rushing) had no problem with that (his concern, of course, was with the effect of Al Jazeera's reporting on the Arab world). In one moving section, Rushing spoke about how viewing on Al Jazeera the remains of US soldiers killed in combat brought a lot of things home for him, including how Iraqis must feel when they see their own dead on CNN. The conversations between Rushing and Hassan Ibrahim were in many ways the heart of the movie, conversations in which Al Jazeera reporter Hassan Ibrahim*, Western-educated and a former BBC reporter, explained that the Arab world simply does not see the same things when looking at the same pictures as the Western world.
The documentary shared Al Jazeera's biases, it is worth noting, so it was almost in equal parts about Al Jazeera itself and about the fundamental wrongness of the US invasion of Iraq.** There were a lot of very wrenching moments, not any the less affecting for their sometimes questionable scriptedness. The US has claimed that a lot of Al Jazeera's footage is misleading, but honestly, how many children in Iraq are being treated for gut wounds who weren't injured by shrapnel? I honestly don't know what to think of the claims that the US military purposefully targeted Arab media outlets in their bombing, because unfortunately it doesn't seem entirely out of the question, but whether that's true or not, it doesn't change the fact that the US killed Al Jazeera reporter Tariq Ayoub.
I walked out of the movie really wanting to believe in Al Jazeera as a force for modernization and democracy and moderation in the Arab world, contrary to the assertions of Rumsfeld and others. The reporters, management and crew all came across as deeply caring human beings who want stability, but not at the expense of independence and integrity. I would love to see some follow-up on how Al Jazeera has reported on the inter-Arab and inter-Iraqi violence in the country. But if even two-thirds of what I saw in the movie was honest, I think Al Jazeera is an excellent start towards rational reporting in the Arab world. I don't believe that anybody is completely objective, ever; even in reporting "just the facts," one picks and chooses which facts are relevant, which requires subjective judgment. So I'm okay with Al JAzeera being biased towards its audience. We're no different here. As individuals we all choose our news sources based on how sympathetic they are to our own biases (I, for one, prefer the Daily Show above all other televised news sources, and I'm a regular Salon reader. There's my bias right there.). All in all, this documentary left me shaking my head over the past and the present, but hopeful for a future where we can all communicate better.
*I was reading the free film magazine from the Kendall on my way home, and read that when Hassan Ibrahim was a young reporter, he and his wife were reporting on the Israeli occupations of Palestinian refugee camps when his wife was raped and killed, probably by soldiers. He says this made him a man of peace and a man dedicated to non-violence, that it taught him violence is never the answer. This sounds corny, but it actually brought tears to my eyes reading this. We saw of him what the filmmaker wanted us to see, but if he's at all what he seems, under the showboating and the hamminess, he's a very good man.
**some of this was inadvertant. Today we know about the 9/11 commission and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal so today we watch Rumsfeld talking about liars and Bush talking about how Iraq should treat US pows with the same care and respect the US gives Iraqi pows with a great deal of bitterness. Or maybe Arab audiences would have been bitter about these scenes from the day one, but they definitely would not have affected me quite the same a few months ago.
It was an oddly familiar movie in one way. Over the last 20 years or so in anthropology (my former calling), the discipline has had to face the existence of native anthropologists, or people of a given culture doing their own ethnography. The party line in anthropology, of course, is that you have to be an outside observer to be objective about what you are seeing, and so these native anthropologists were treated with a great deal of skepticism (or with outright hostility or a patronizing form of postcolonial racism in which it was admitted that yes, everybody was biased, but Westerners have a better bias so it's okay). These native anthropologists in turn asked what made the non-native observers think they were so objective, when their work was obviously, to the natives, filled with all kinds of biases. This kind of debate can easily descend into postmodern navel-gazing, but when you are talking about real people's lives and ways of being, it is a very important issue to confront.
So I saw this anthropological debate reflected very clearly in the discussions in Control Room about journalism and objectivity and standards. The Al Jazeera crew had no trouble admitting they were biased in favor of Arab interests--it was their default starting position. However, like those native anthropologists, they insisted that their observations and reporting had as much validity as that of Western journalists, and in fact Al Jazeera was necessary to provide balance. They made their case pretty convincingly, and it seemed as though by the end of the filming that even the US Army Media Specialist (or whatever his title was, Rushing) had no problem with that (his concern, of course, was with the effect of Al Jazeera's reporting on the Arab world). In one moving section, Rushing spoke about how viewing on Al Jazeera the remains of US soldiers killed in combat brought a lot of things home for him, including how Iraqis must feel when they see their own dead on CNN. The conversations between Rushing and Hassan Ibrahim were in many ways the heart of the movie, conversations in which Al Jazeera reporter Hassan Ibrahim*, Western-educated and a former BBC reporter, explained that the Arab world simply does not see the same things when looking at the same pictures as the Western world.
The documentary shared Al Jazeera's biases, it is worth noting, so it was almost in equal parts about Al Jazeera itself and about the fundamental wrongness of the US invasion of Iraq.** There were a lot of very wrenching moments, not any the less affecting for their sometimes questionable scriptedness. The US has claimed that a lot of Al Jazeera's footage is misleading, but honestly, how many children in Iraq are being treated for gut wounds who weren't injured by shrapnel? I honestly don't know what to think of the claims that the US military purposefully targeted Arab media outlets in their bombing, because unfortunately it doesn't seem entirely out of the question, but whether that's true or not, it doesn't change the fact that the US killed Al Jazeera reporter Tariq Ayoub.
I walked out of the movie really wanting to believe in Al Jazeera as a force for modernization and democracy and moderation in the Arab world, contrary to the assertions of Rumsfeld and others. The reporters, management and crew all came across as deeply caring human beings who want stability, but not at the expense of independence and integrity. I would love to see some follow-up on how Al Jazeera has reported on the inter-Arab and inter-Iraqi violence in the country. But if even two-thirds of what I saw in the movie was honest, I think Al Jazeera is an excellent start towards rational reporting in the Arab world. I don't believe that anybody is completely objective, ever; even in reporting "just the facts," one picks and chooses which facts are relevant, which requires subjective judgment. So I'm okay with Al JAzeera being biased towards its audience. We're no different here. As individuals we all choose our news sources based on how sympathetic they are to our own biases (I, for one, prefer the Daily Show above all other televised news sources, and I'm a regular Salon reader. There's my bias right there.). All in all, this documentary left me shaking my head over the past and the present, but hopeful for a future where we can all communicate better.
*I was reading the free film magazine from the Kendall on my way home, and read that when Hassan Ibrahim was a young reporter, he and his wife were reporting on the Israeli occupations of Palestinian refugee camps when his wife was raped and killed, probably by soldiers. He says this made him a man of peace and a man dedicated to non-violence, that it taught him violence is never the answer. This sounds corny, but it actually brought tears to my eyes reading this. We saw of him what the filmmaker wanted us to see, but if he's at all what he seems, under the showboating and the hamminess, he's a very good man.
**some of this was inadvertant. Today we know about the 9/11 commission and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal so today we watch Rumsfeld talking about liars and Bush talking about how Iraq should treat US pows with the same care and respect the US gives Iraqi pows with a great deal of bitterness. Or maybe Arab audiences would have been bitter about these scenes from the day one, but they definitely would not have affected me quite the same a few months ago.
