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Today's commentary: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-12/01schechter.cfm ================================== ZNet Commentary AL Jazeera Takes on the World in English December 10, 2006 By Danny Schechter As they say when the Olympics convene, "Let The Games Begin." A new Olympics gets underway today, the news Olympics, as the anglo-American hegemony of the big news cartels has for the first time a challenger in the form of wellpackaged professional network. alJazeera international goes on the air globally (but not yet in the USA) to offer another perspective. The Arabic language news channel that revolutionized news in the Arab World has just marked its tenth anniversary and become once again the world's fifth top known brand.. alJazeera marks the occasion with the launch of channel in English (not just a translation of the original) with a sports channel, documentary channel and their own CSPAN type special events channel. For now, the rest of the world will be watching but not the American people. Why, the heavily monopolized cable industry can't find any room in their multi-channel universe for the new kid on the block. Is it political? In part, but beyond that broadcasters know how critical so many Americans are of the news goo on the air and might leap to an attractive alternation. Is it any surprise than the industry that keeps blathering on about free choice denies it to a foreign-based competitor even as the US networks long ago went global. While they condemn others blocking their signals, they shamelessly block others. Time Magazine, part of Time Warner that also runs CNN, spoke with Wadah Kanfer, the journalist turned news executive running all of al Jazeera: Their piece is titled, what else, "The Al Jazeera Invasion." Their website carries an ad for a show on Arab extremists by CNN's hard right program host Glen Beck. This is a form of hidden hostility packaged as objective journalism: TIME: What is the purpose of Al Jazeera English? Wadah Khanfar: Al Jazeera is the only international network that is based in the developing world, and that will be the departure point for the English channel. I am not speaking about the geographical south, but the cultural, social and political south. The 'south' has not been presented in the international media properly. Why? Because most of the international media organizations are centered in the West. We would like to present a new model. We will take the south into consideration. We will cover the world, but will take the south as a departure point and a priority. TIME: What does that mean? Khanfar: When an international news organization covers a story in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan or wherever, they will fly a crew to go there, spend a few days, interact with some officials and analysts, most of the time English-speaking elite, and file the story and go home. At Al Jazeera, we are getting our local Somalis, Yemenis and Sudanese, local correspondents from within the society, who understand much better than the people who come from overseas. We will get a much better insightÂ…. There has been widespread fear and loathing of Al Jazeera often led by people who never watched it or couldn't understand it if they could. A campaign of disinformation orchestrated by the Pentagon has sought to discredit the channel as "Terrorist TV." The alJazeera office in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed by US planes. An alJazeera journalist is being held at Guantanamo without charge. There were reports that President Bush and Tony Blair discussed bombing the station's headquarters in Doha. Documents of their conversations have not been released. Despite all this, alJazeera has hired an international team with many recognized and respected journalists including Dave Marash who worked for ABC' Nightline for years. One of their biggest catches was Sir David Frost, the world famous interviewer. He told the Guardian that he was initially nervous about signing on: "Sir David Frost has revealed how he investigated al-Jazeera's credentials with his own high-level contacts in Whitehall and Washington before agreeing to sign up to its long-delayed English language channel, which launches today. "In an interview in today's G2, Sir David, who is scheduled to welcome Tony Blair as the first guest to his show on Friday, said he initially had qualms about signing for the broadcaster after trenchant criticism from the American right. "So I deliberately checked out, with Whitehall and with Washington, that there were no links with al-Qaida, for instance, that sort of thing," he said. "And it was not really a surprise that there were no such links, because Qatar, the proprietor of al-Jazeera, is also our most important ally in the Middle East." The Guardian newspaper did more than carry this interviews. They praised alJazeera in an editorial: "Just as British reports have their biases, as a new study on the Iraq war underlines, so al-Jazeera has its own. But by reporting inconvenient facts and airing diverse views, it has helped the Arab region. By offering a new slant, it will do good for the wider world too." Here in the USA, we need viewers to demand that Al Jazeera be shown the way an earlier generation of cable viewers supported the "I want my MTV" campaigns. It is important that Americans are exposed to other points of view and information missing in our media system because of media concentration and manipulation. Its time we were allowed to tune in the world. Let's give the new channel a chance while we fight for our freedom of choice. News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He has been interviewed on alJazeera and covered the channel's Iraq war coverage in his film WMD. (wmdthefilm.com) Comments to [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Danger: A Policy With No Brains By Susan J. Douglas Views > December 7, 2006 http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2932/ Too many women have forgotten what affirmative action meant for us. How many of us hold jobs previously reserved for men? Here at the University of Michigan, where the majority of the students and faculty are not right-wing, religious-zealot Republicans pining for the rapture, there has been elation over the election results and the massive, nationwide rejection of Team Bush's clenched fist around our collective necks. But it was also a day of great disappointment, as Michigan voters passed the cynically titled "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative," (MCRI) which bans the use of affirmative action by all public institutions in the state. Here we see--in a state that voted Democratic-- the ongoing success of conservatives in using race as a wedge issue, and the language of "race neutrality" and "an end to racial preferences" to do so. Racial resentments, disguised as a totally innocent desire simply to have a "level playing field," are alive and well, especially in a state with the worst economy in the country. The drive to pass the MCRI was led by Jennifer Gratz--a white woman who was put on the UM waitlist in 1995 instead of being immediately accepted and has turned her rejection into an 11-year tantrum--and Ward Connerly, architect of anti-affirmative action Prop. 209 in California. This has long been a winning strategy for the right: have women and people of color serve as the poster children for rolling back civil rights. The ban passed overwhelmingly--58 to 42 percent--with support from a whopping 70 percent of white men. Women were more divided, but nonetheless a CNN exit poll found that 59 percent of white women favored the ban, and even 30 percent of non-white men supported it. Those with incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 voted most overwhelmingly of all income groups to end affirmative action. And of all educational levels, those with college degrees endorsed the ban most strongly. What to make of this? The ones who came out in force against the ban were, not surprisingly, women of color, who know the double whammy of being discriminated against based on race and gender. Interestingly, people 45 and over--those who lived through the civil rights and women's movements and presumably remember what the workplace and educational institutions were like before--voted most strongly against banning affirmative action, although in the predominantly student precincts around the Ann Arbor campus, the vote was 75 percent against the ban. The loss is especially poignant here as UM has been one of the nation's leaders and stalwart defenders of affirmative action. The law school, responding to the civil rights movement and recognizing that its student body was almost entirely white, began its own affirmative action program in 1966. Black student activism in the early '70s also spurred increased recruitment of minority students. A 1988 mandate helped increase minority enrollment from 13.5 percent in 1987 to 25.4 percent in 1996. And, of course, the university famously fought for its admissions policies before the Supreme Court in 2003, winning the right to continue to use race as one of the factors in its admissions decisions. Here are the distortions and misconceptions that have gotten us to this pass. People like Gratz (who had a good high school GPA and mediocre ACT scores) claim that unqualified people of color take admissions slots away from qualified white students. Studies, however, show that eliminating affirmative action raises white applicants' chances of admission by only 1.5 to 2 percent, tops. Why? There are so many white kids competing for slots at colleges, especially selective ones, and relatively few students of color, that using affirmative action just doesn't reduce white students' admissions chances much at all. The racializing of affirmative action, combined with the post-feminist notion that white women have achieved complete equality, has also, seemingly, made too many women forget what affirmative action has meant for us. How many of us in jobs previously reserved for men would have them without affirmative action? And, as UM psychologist Patricia Gurin points out, the state of Michigan ranks 49 out of 50 in pay disparities between men and women; MCRI could make this even worse. And just look at California: there's been a 60 percent decline in black enrollments at Berkeley since Prop. 209 passed. At noon on Nov. 8 on The Diag, the central quad on campus, Mary Sue Coleman, president of the UM, addressed an unusually large crowd of about 2,000 people. She defiantly asserted the importance of diversity to the university, and vowed to search for legal challenges to the law, which may be easier said than done. When I first came here to teach, a black student sat in the first row of my lecture, frequently wearing a T-shirt that read "Danger: Black Man With a Brain." He was one of the best students in the class, full of intellectual chutzpah of the best sort. For many of us here, his T-shirt represents a promise. Clearly, still and sadly, for too many white people it represents a threat. -------------------------------------------------- Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women. _____________________________________________ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. Submit an article: portside.org/submit Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe Unsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribe Account assistance: portside.org/contact Search the archives: portside.org/archive *** Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2006 13:27:09 -0500 (EST) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [NYTr] Chavez ties No. 1: TIME Person of the Year 2006 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (NY Transfer List) Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii [Turn your javascript ON for AOL.COM (The poll is run from an AOL IP address). Then vote. You can vote repeatedly as long as you have a different IP address each time. -NYTr] sent by glparramatta (activ-l) - Dec 9, 2006 Support for Chavez to be Time Person of the Year has steadily risen until he is polling 25%, tied for first place. Help put him over the top by voting and forwarding this link and urging others to vote. http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2006/walkup/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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