by Brendan James
Laura Bennett is impressed with the new American channel, but notes that “the overall effect is not quite as different from the rest of cable news as Al Jazeera imagines it”:
The overall message is clear: that this is an open and democratic forum, a place for guests to freely express complicated and wide-ranging views rather than have them crammed into ideological categories. Of course, in its own sly way, Al Jazeera pushes its politics with the same insistence as Fox or MSNBC, if not with nearly the same theatrics; an undercurrent of Bush-era exasperation with American blinkeredness still runs through every report from the Middle East. And it’s strange to see #pray4Egypt flashing on the bottom of the screen, a subtle bit of community-building that makes audience participation seem more ideological than ever.
But Al Jazeera’s coverage is fueled by a placid faith in the reasonableness of its position rather than a knee-jerk ideological defensiveness.
Lloyd Grove felt that, during the network’s debut, the “pace was slow, the production values were plodding and predictable, and the presentation relied heavily on yakking, and more yakking, straight to camera.” But he hopes the network will succeed:
[I]n an age of media belt tightening, when once-imposing journalistic institutions are being shuttered or sold for a fraction of their historic value, it is heartening that a Gulf-state emir, of all people, is willing to spend hundreds of millions, and probably billions, of dollars to field a serious news organization in the United States. For that reason alone, I am rooting for Al Jazeera America and its 850-odd staffers led by veteran ABC News executive Kate O’Brian, and hope they find a way to reach an audience, attract advertisers, and land on a growing number of cable systems.
Ana Marie Cox doles out high praise for AJAM’s nightly news program, America Tonight:
What’s revolutionary about the show is what wasn’t in it: no mention of “Obamacare” (indeed, I’m not sure there was a mention of Obama, specifically). No mention of rodeo clowns, or Ted Cruz’s birth certificate, or Hillary. Nothing about gun control or Trayvon Martin, either. Nor voting rights, gay rights and the Olympics, nor the Tea Party.
It’s as if the producers: a) knew that the first primaries for 2016 were a year away; and b) understood that some topics, while worthwhile, had not further evolved since they were last discussed. While there was a suspicious lack of “America” to the stories on “America Tonight”, what stories did run bore more relevance to the contemporary lives of average Americans than anything on the other networks.
The Dish 