International News response

While I like BBC, the first story I head was about how other European countries should “drop” their own currencies and adopt the Euro. This would seem to be in favor the European Monetary Union and the governments which currently use the Euro. However, they still have a bit of the Murrow essence, heard in the story containing information about Google. The BBC correspondents talked about the negatives, but also allowed a senior writer from Wired Magazine to talk about the positives of the program. The story could have been done better however if they allowed someone from Google to respond to the story.

Also, in another BBC segment about people who survived internment camps, they let a Holocaust survivor argue with someone who was arguing that people who have been tortured can become torturers very easily. In Murrow’s fashion, both sides of the argument were allowed to voice their opinions. However, in the small snippets of news which the BBC broadcasts, it gives a very one-sided story. Nonetheless, the news does not seem to favor the British government in any way.

On Russia Today the news seemed very unbiased, but also very “feature”-like. There were several religious undertones in the broadcast, and I’m not sure whether or not this supports Russia’s government. I watched Russia Today for about a half an hour, and did not find very much that it seemed to lean toward favoring Russia’s government. However, being that the stories were so much like feature stories, there was not too much information given on the opposite side of the argument. In a story about kidney transplants the story discussed how people in Moldova were looking for jobs, were told they could earn $500 a month, and were sent to Turkey where they had a kidney removed against their will. The only mention on the opposite side of the argument was mentioning that some people willingly donated organs for money. Also, they seemed to only really report on information which contained Eastern Europe in some way. So, although not very Murrow-esque, they did have some very intriguing news and seem to have a knack for creating stories which keep the viewer engaged. However, I feel that I would have to watch these stations at different times on many different days to get a real feel for their true direction and Murrow-ness.


1. How effective do you think the Internet will be for Al Jazeera as it attempts to reach a U.S. audience?
Although the internet seems to me to be quickly becoming a more popular medium for reaching news, I don’t know that it is helping reach a U.S. audience in all that significant of a way. I think, like expressed in several of the news stories, that Americans fear Al Jazeera, and will be very reluctant to use it to get their news until Americans en mass begin to accept that not all Arabs are terrorists. However, since Al Jazeera is now available via the internet, it is now much more available to those who do with to watch it than it would have been had it only been available on T.V.

2. Based on your own observations, do you think that Al Jazeera English should be allowed to broadcast in the U.S.?
Al Jazeera has every right to be broadcast in the U.S. The staff are intelligent and well-educated, and are not broadcasting terrorist messages via the aforementioned news group. In the fashion of Murrow, every person should get to have a voice and an opinion, and letting Al Jazeera be broadcast is important to upholding all of our standards of living. If we begin not allowing certain networks to broadcast, we are stifling well-deserving people of their right to have opinions, which is a very dictator-like way to run any operation. They also had a lot of first-hand footage of events, showing readers that the things they broadcasted on were not fictitious.

3. What, if anything, do you notice about Al Jazeera's approach to telling the news? How is it different than the U.S.-based TV news outlets that you have experienced?
Al Jazeera’s approach to telling the news seemed very similar to Russia Today’s. Both offered a lot of in-depth information, and didn’t skim stories. Also, they seemed to sometimes have more of a human-interest lean than U.S. stations which aim to get people to either be scared of something, or buy a product (anyone reminded of news stations that started running stories about the Snuggie?). Al Jazeera took more interest in how major events were affecting ordinary people.

4. While on the Al Jazeera site, be sure to check out the network's published Code of Ethics. Based on your own observations, do you think they are adhering to them?
I feel that the Al Jazeera team does adhere quite well to their own Code of Ethics. However, I did notice that most of the information they reported on had to be tied to their own country in some way, which does not comply with the “Treat our audiences with due respect and address every issue or story with due attention to present a clear, factual and accurate picture…” or the part about, “Recognise diversity in human societies with all their races, cultures and beliefs and their values and intrinsic individualities in order to present unbiased and faithful reflection of them.”
Noting this however, I must say that on the whole, they do a much better job being ethical and unbiased than most major American news sites do.