Live Coverage Of The Gaza War Hasn't Made It Into Most American Living Rooms (Al Jazeera)

[Hissyspit]

Mods, this is chiefly an article about media coverage.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/118080/what_you%27d_know_about_israel_if_you_watched_al_jazeera_tv_

What You'd Know About Israel If You Watched Al Jazeera TV

By Shane Bauer, New America Media. Posted January 9, 2009.

Live coverage of the war hasn't made it into most American living rooms.

DAMASCUS, Syria -- Throughout the 11 days of Israel's pummeling of Gaza, live coverage of the war hasn't made it into most American living rooms.

That's because Israel, America's staunch ally, isn't allowing journalists to enter Gaza while Al Jazeera, called anti-American and pro-terrorist by many in Washington, is the only network broadcasting live images from Gaza to the world.

The 350 reporters who descended on Israel when the conflict began are stuck at the border between Israel and Gaza. Israel says that opening border crossings to journalists would put their soldiers in danger, but many have accused them of trying to control the story. Instead of giving their viewers up-close pictorial evidence of what is occurring in Gaza, television networks have been restricted to showing their viewers plumes of smoke as they rise in the distance.

But Al Jazeera, the Qatari network that has previously undergone attacks and had its reporters arrested by the U.S. military, remains typically defiant. While other networks are increasingly severed from Gaza as phone lines are cut and 75 percent of the territory is without electricity, Al Jazeera is bringing its approximately 140 million English- and Arabic-speaking viewers live images of bombings, tanks rolling through Gaza's farmland, and interviews with civilians and aid workers inside Gaza city.

Like all of the networks, Al Jazeera gives constant hard-hitting interviews with politicians and analysts from Israel, the West Bank, and the rest of the Arab world. But while others can only balance pundits with more pundits, Al Jazeera has been taking the viewer to the scene to weigh the words of politicians against the reality on the ground.

Take Israel's claim that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. After showing an Israeli politician writing off the assertion of the existence of a humanitarian disaster, Al Jazeera cut to the Al Shifa hospital, the largest in all of Gaza. There, we saw that there were not enough medical supplies and civilians lying on bloody hospital beds told us that their lives were not only being crippled by bombs falling on their houses, but by the extreme lack of water and food for the people cowering inside them.

- snip -

Many went home and watched the ground invasion live a couple of hours later in night vision-green on Al Jazeera. Since then, the death toll has climbed to at least 598, according to Al Jazeera, with 2,700 injured.

Meanwhile, the world's only live coverage of the tragedy is kept away from American eyes. While Al Jazeera English competes with CNN and BBC as one of the largest networks in the world, no major American cable provider has been willing to carry the channel since it launched in 2006. Some say cable providers are squeamish about working with a channel popularly perceived in the United States as giving airtime to terrorists.

MORE

[dipsydoodle]

1. In the UK we get almost continuous coverage

across BBC, SKY and CNN.

[Junkdrawer]

2. I tuned into CNN to get an update - NOTHING until 45 minutes after the hour....

and then it was 15 seconds - about the UN resolution.

If you can't say anything good about Israel, say nothing at all.

[mmonk]

3. Actual live coverage concerning war is no longer encouraged

in the States. People might might see its consequences and not like it similar to when Vietnam got coverage. The US can't embed journalists there.