# Posted 12:14 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE HEROES OF AL-JAZEERA: The subtitle of this film should have been "If Michael Moore Had a Brain". Control Room, a documentary by Jehane Noujaim, takes us inside Al Jazeera's Qatar headquarters during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. With a subtlety not often found in the midst of a presidential election, Noujaim portrays the producers and correspondents of Al Jazeera as the last true heirs of Woodward & Bernstein -- unarmed men and women unafraid to speak truth to power.

The critics' praise for Control Room has been overwhelming. In the NYT, A.O. Scott writes that it is

An indispensable example of the inquisitive, self-questioning democratic spirit that is its deep and vexed subject.

Ann Hornaday of the WaPo writes that it is

The first movie of the year to qualify as urgently important...

This engrossing portrait of competing notions of truth is at once a thrilling real-time chronicle of the birth of a free press and a sophisticated philosophical treatise on the nature of objective reality.

In other words, liberal film critics love Control Room because it advances a firm leftist critique of American ignorance and ethnocentrism while presenting itself as an unbiased and self-aware observer of America at war.

One of the twin protagonists of the film is producer Sameer Khader, who describes Al Jazeera as an institution committed to advancing the ideals of freedom and democracy by providing an alternative to the state-run Arab media. I agree that Al Jazeera plays a critical role in challenging the information monopoly of the Arab dictatorships, but Noujaim drops this point right after Khader makes it.

Instead, Control Room focuses on how Al Jazeera challenges American military propaganda in a manner (supposedly) far more effective than than the (supposedly) co-opted and covertly patriotic journalists of the American media establishment. This is exactly the point that Michael Moore tried to make in Fahrenheit 9/11, but Noujaim does it with far greater panache.

Noujaim systematically builds up her subject's credibility by demonstrating that it has made all the right enemies. First, Donald Rumsfeld accuses Al Jazeera of broadcasting nothing more than Iraqi propaganda. Then an Iraqi spokesman accuses Al Jazeera of broadcasting nothing more than American propaganda.

Then comes Noujaim's coup de grace: After interviewing an American activist who denounces the war as part of an oil-driven imperial project, Khader (the producer mentioned above) berates his subordinate for booking an interview subject with such a one-sided perspective. The subordinate meekly protests that he assumed an American activist wouldn't voice such unfair criticism of his own country.

What better way to establish Al Jazeera's cross-cultural empathy and commitment to journalistic detachment than showing how its employees can recognize when American citizens are criticizing their own government too harshly? Well, I for one am not impressed. Any journalist not on an Arab government's payroll should be able to recognize that Chomsky's court jesters do not have much to contribute to a serious news program.

When not demonstrating Al Jazeera's supposed impartiality, Noujaim tries to demonstrate her own fairness by giving a young US Army spokeman the chance to defend his government's actions. According to the Boston Globe,

Noujaim's film is at its best in its sympathetic and complex portrayal of Lieutenant Josh Rushing, an earnest young US army press officer at CentCom whose naivete about war and news-gathering slowly crumbles before our eyes.

Whereas Michael Moore's bombast often results in the audience siding with his victims, Noujaim's kindness toward Rushing lets us forget that she has cast this one lieutenant as the living embodiment of American ignorance.

Rushing, however, is far from ignorant. What he is is overmatched. Facing off against the second protaganist of the film, veteran Al Jazeera correspondent Hassan Ibrahim (formerly of the BBC), Rushing doesn't stand a chance. To make matters worse, Noujaim devotes the rest of her narrative to undercutting almost all of the points that Rushing makes.

For example, Rushing asks at one point why Al Jazeera insists on portraying the invasion of Iraq as a threat to the Arab world when, in fact, Saddam Hussein has slaughtered far more Arabs than any other ruler alive today. Rushing also asks why Al Jazeera's standard cut-to-commerical montage interlaces footage of American soldiers and war planes with footage of wounded Iraqi civilians. Why not show what Saddam's soldiers have done to the Iraqi people?

In spite of this warning, Noujaim includes extensive and explicitly gory footage of wounded Iraqi civilians without ever pausing to ask whether the Iraqi people suffered more, day in and day out, under Saddam Hussein. Like Fahrenheit 9/11, Control Room doesn't even try to put a number on how many Iraqi civilians lost their lives during the invasion. Instead, Noujaim just replays and replays Al Jazeera footage in which Iraqis stand in front of their bombed out homes asking if this is what George Bush meant by freedom and demoracy.

According to Human Rights Watch, there are no reliable counts of how many civilians died during the invasion, although the number seems to be in the thousands. Saddam's own government announced during the final week of the war that there had been 1,254 civilian deaths. Whatever the true number, it pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands murdered by Saddam. It also pales in comparison to the one million deaths projected by leading humanitarian NGOs.

The saddest thing about Control Room is what it could have been. The rise of independent networks such as Al Jazeera is a revolutionary development in the Arab World. Instead of recycling standard leftist criticisms of the war, Noujaim might have asked whether the democratic aspirations of Al Jazeera's producers and correspondents have awoken similar aspirations in the network's 40 million Arab viewers. Whereas Saddam Hussein fell to American arms, the best hope for the liberation of Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia may be Al Jazeera.

CORRECTION: BH wisely points out that Iran does not speak Arabic, so Al Jazeera is somewhat irrelevant. Besides, Iran is a pretty dumb example given that it has such a strong indigenous democratic movement. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion