Freedom
Fight Against
'Freedom Champions'
By Dahr Jamail
05 April, 2007
Inter Press Service
DOHA, Apr 2 (IPS) - The al-Jazeera television network
could be emerging as a freedom champion against U.S. pressures on the
channel, leading media figures say.
"I support al-Jazeera
because al-Jazeera has done more to propagate democracy in the Middle
East region than anybody else, certainly more than the American government
has done," media specialist Hugh Miles told IPS. "It's strange
to me that people refer to al-Jazeera as a 'terrorist network' because
that couldn't be further from the truth."
Miles spoke to IPS at the
third annual al-Jazeera forum at Doha in Qatar Mar. 31 to Apr. 2. The
forum highlighted the successful recent expansion of the network while
also addressing difficulties that reporters face in the Middle East
hot spots.
Miles, author of 'Al Jazeera:
How Arab TV News Challenged the World' and an award- winning freelance
journalist said former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had got
it wrong on al-Jazeera.
"Al-Jazeera has been
called a 'terrorist network' or 'the voice of (Osama) bin Laden', but
this just demonstrates deep ignorance of its history and the channel,"
Miles said.
The 10-year-old al-Jazeera
network weathered a U.S. military attack on its Baghdad office during
the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in April 2003. It faced accusations from
Rumsfeld that it promoted terrorism by airing beheadings and other attacks.
Al-Jazeera editors say that
the channel has never aired a beheading, nor does it support terrorism.
Other leading voices at the
forum spoke in support of the channel, that has been under frequent
attack of all kinds. The forum, titled 'Media and the Middle East: Going
Beyond the Headlines' brought journalists, international media leaders
and scholars from around the world to discuss critical issues facing
the media, with a focus on in-depth journalism.
The conference followed the
launching of al-Jazeera English, a 24-hour English-language news channel
that went on air in November 2006 with more than 80 million households
viewing it worldwide -- an unprecedented launch in the broadcast industry.
"There has been a four,
five, six-year campaign against al-Jazeera," said Aidan White,
general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists at
a panel discussion. "This is a prejudice we cannot ignore."
Abdul Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief
of the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Quds al- Arabi told IPS that
"journalists should unite and raise our voices to say no to this
kind of brutal treatment by the leader of the free world, by people
who are representing freedom. We should stand united against the new
wave of embedded journalism because this is censorship.
"Freedom of expression
is said to be a part of Western values," Atwan added. "The
American administration is destroying Western values by shooting journalists,
by killing the messenger."
"The largest perpetrators
of murdering journalists are governments," Frank Smyth, Washington
representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said at
the forum.
Many other journalists are
detained without fair trial. Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese
national, was detained by the U.S. military in Afghanistan in December
2001. He has yet to be charged, and continues to be held as "enemy
combatant" at Guantanamo Bay.
On Aug. 7, 2004, the U.S.-backed
Iraqi interim government led by former CIA asset Iyad Allawi shut down
the Iraq office of al-Jazeera, claiming that it was presenting a negative
image of Iraq, and charging the network with "fueling anti-coalition
hostilities."
Much of the difficulties
governments have had with al-Jazeera have arisen because it gets stories
other channels do not have.
That makes it similar to
the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, said IPS director-general
Mario Lubetkin. Al-Jazeera has much in common with IPS because the Arab
network "goes for the news behind the news," and "because
they cover the south," he said.
Lubetkin added that "we
are working with them, they pick up a lot of stories from us in Arabic."
The forum addressed several
issues such as 'parachute journalism', 'journalism of depth' and the
new media. But the dominant theme remained attacks on journalists in
an increasingly difficult global environment.
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