Control Room
Ugh... I was so hung over today... judging from the state of the living room, we polished off a bottle of champagne, a bottle of wine, and most of a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle.. and that's just after we got home. From my previous post, I infer that I also drank beer (possibly in large quantities).
After stumbling out of bed into an awfully bright, warm, and humid day, it became obvious that the afternoon would be best spent indoors in the air conditioning, preferably one without direct sunlight. We went to go see Control Room, a documentary about the media coverage of the Iraq war. It provided an Arab perspective that I hadn't really heard before. The movie is really pro-Al-Jazeera, although it's honest about that bias. It showed a lot of context that cast US actions in a different light than the original western media coverage implied. Like, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. video taken from a wider perspective shows that the square was empty except for the small group of men taking down the statue - regular Iraqi people were too afraid to come out of their houses to watch, so the only people cheering them on were US soldiers.
Their footage of the US military hostages was especially striking. At some point before the tanks rolled into Baghdad, Bush had given a speech where he had said something along the lines of that we were going to find the terrorists or insurgents or whoever and bring them to justice, and that no individual Iraqi would be able to stand behind the defense of 'just following orders'. In the footage of the hostages, the captor asks each in turn why he is in Iraq. Each soldier says "I was just following orders". This doesn't imply that I think the soldiers are doing anything wrong, or that they should have some other answer - I think they are just following orders, and somebody higher up the chain is ultimately responsible for the actions of the military as whole - but I thought the counterpoint was food for thought.
I'm not sure what I think about Al Jazeera. I should probably watch some of their actual broadcasts before forming an opinion about them. But they showed real consequences to the war even when the US told them not to, and I figure that's probably a good step forward for journalism in the middle east.
After stumbling out of bed into an awfully bright, warm, and humid day, it became obvious that the afternoon would be best spent indoors in the air conditioning, preferably one without direct sunlight. We went to go see Control Room, a documentary about the media coverage of the Iraq war. It provided an Arab perspective that I hadn't really heard before. The movie is really pro-Al-Jazeera, although it's honest about that bias. It showed a lot of context that cast US actions in a different light than the original western media coverage implied. Like, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. video taken from a wider perspective shows that the square was empty except for the small group of men taking down the statue - regular Iraqi people were too afraid to come out of their houses to watch, so the only people cheering them on were US soldiers.
Their footage of the US military hostages was especially striking. At some point before the tanks rolled into Baghdad, Bush had given a speech where he had said something along the lines of that we were going to find the terrorists or insurgents or whoever and bring them to justice, and that no individual Iraqi would be able to stand behind the defense of 'just following orders'. In the footage of the hostages, the captor asks each in turn why he is in Iraq. Each soldier says "I was just following orders". This doesn't imply that I think the soldiers are doing anything wrong, or that they should have some other answer - I think they are just following orders, and somebody higher up the chain is ultimately responsible for the actions of the military as whole - but I thought the counterpoint was food for thought.
I'm not sure what I think about Al Jazeera. I should probably watch some of their actual broadcasts before forming an opinion about them. But they showed real consequences to the war even when the US told them not to, and I figure that's probably a good step forward for journalism in the middle east.
posted by Lexi Baugher at 23:37
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