Control Room

Three stars

A documentary written and directed by Jehane Noujaim. Released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 84 minutes. No MPAA rating.

by Michael Drakulich

In the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and leading up to the United States’ war in Iraq, we heard quite a bit from the U.S. Defense Department about the Arab satellite television news network Al-Jazeera and how it was unabashedly pro-Saddam Hussein.

With Jehane Noujaim's documentary “Control Room,” we get a very different picture of Al-Jazeera in which their journalists follow much of the same principles as western journalists and display similar fallibility.

While it does not attempt to portray the news channel as a paragon of journalistic virtue, the film challenges American perceptions about it and raises pertinent questions about the United States’ involvement in Iraq and that country’s alleged ties to al-Qaida.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were perhaps the most outspoken critics of the television network, calling it the “mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden.”

Perhaps there is a kernel of truth to that sentiment, but you might find it only when you find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

The film did its best to establish the network’s independence from outside influence. To a large extent, it succeeded.

The network’s journalists didn’t spew terror-mongering, anti-American rhetoric in the name of Allah as some might expect.

If anything, they displayed more similarities to westerners than their own culture, from their style of reporting to the way they dressed.

With Arab fundamentalists known for being a punishingly harsh patriarchal society, there was no hint of it at the station. Women held high positions of management and everyone dressed in western business suits.

While the State Department has called the network just slightly left of fundamentalist, Al-Jazeera’s questions of the American government were logical and well thought. It’s the answers the American military provided that didn’t particularly stand up to scrutiny.

Yes, I understand that the military can and should only release measured amounts of information. But when it became clear the U.S. would not find weapons of mass destruction there, the reason for invad-ing changed. It suddenly became an opportunity borne of altruism to liberate a people from a brutal tyrant.

Or, as one Al-Jazeera reporter pointed out, it’s as if the American soldiers said to the Iraqi people, “Democratize or we’ll shoot.”

Some of Al-Jazeera’s responses to its American critics were particularly stinging.

When the State Department criticized the network for showing American POWs on film because it violated terms of the Geneva Convention, one reporter retorted that bombing another country without authorization from the United Nations Security Council was a violation as well.

If there is anything to be gleaned here it is that the channel and its journalists are more like the American media than we realize. They may not be as convenient a villain as some would want us to believe.

Samir Khader, a producer for the network, says the network’s objective is education and to show the human cost of the war.

“We care for them,” he says. “We are Arabs like them. We are Moslems like them.” It is a position the American media might very well take were a war fought on our soil.

Writer and director Jehane Noujaim doesn’t try to hide the network’s flaws either.

Janet Tucker, who manages the network’s web content, is asked by a western journalist if her station have remained impartial. She sidesteps the question with a question of her own, asking the presumed American journalist if his colleagues have done the same.

Nobody can really say how accurate coverage was, from either side. However, knowing that the U.S. military was practically the sole source of information for the American media, it is easy to question accuracy or the potential for spin.

This film may appear to be yet another ploy to ridicule President Bush’s foreign policy in an election year.

To write it off as simply that diminishes its accomplishment. Audiences should come away at least entertaining the possibilty that Al-Jazeera may be a more independent, credible news source rather than a Muslim fundamentalist propaganda machine.

Michael Drakulich is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He may be reached at
mdrakulich@starnewspapers.com
or (708) 802-8841.