Control Room
Dir. by Jehane Noujaim

REVIEW -- Al-Jazeera is most often described as the CNN of the Arab world. It's more useful to think of it in terms of Fox News -- the right-wing, rah-rah America! channel. In fact, Samir Khader, Al-Jazeera's senior producer, openly admires Fox and says he'd be open to working for the network some day.

Control Room, a film by the Egyptian-American director Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com), provides a compelling, emotionally honest, if incomplete, look at this TV news operation that reaches an estimated 35 million to 40 million people in the Arab world. It could reach more, but it is banned in many Arab countries.

Al-Jazeera became newsworthy in Canada last week when it was awarded a broadcast license. The Canadian Radio-Televison and Telecommunications Commission required companies carrying al-Jazeera to monitor it 24 hours per day for offensive content -- sort of like the seven-second delay on Don Cherry.

The Emir of Qatar, leader of the oil-rich Gulf state, founded al-Jazeera in 1996. By happenstance, al-Jazeera's headquarters are about 30 kilometres from U.S. Central Command (CentCom) -- the media headquarters of the Iraq war.

Khader thinks al-Jazeera should help Arabs learn about democracy and free speech. "We want to wake up these rigid societies," he says, waving his hand. "Wake up, wake up!"

Noujaim -- who, like many documentarians, made her film on a shoestring budget -- begins it in the period just before the start of the Iraq war on March 19, 2003.

In a Doha, Qatar café, some Arab men talk about the impending conflict. One is Al-Jazeera journalist Hassan Ibrahim. As he drives to CentCom, he mutters, "Bush has managed to rally people behind Saddam Hussein." Ibrahim was the head of Arabic news for the BBC before he joined al-Jazeera. He went to grade school in Saudi Arabia with Osama bin Laden. While he's deeply skeptical about the Bush administration, he's equally optimistic about the U.S. Constitution and the American people.

His counterpoint is the idealistic Lt. Josh Rushing of the U.S. Marines, a CentCom press officer.

In one exchange, the two debate the bombing damage being inflicted on Baghdad by the U.S. Rushing claims precision-guided missiles are used specifically to minimize civilian deaths. Ibrahim scoffs, saying, "you're bombing the hell out of Baghdad."

When Rushing counters by asking him compared to what, mentioning the bombing of Tokyo or cities in Germany in the Second World War, Ibrahim replies: "The bombing of Dresden was before television."

The Allies attacked Dresden, a German city of about 650,000, in February 1945. An estimated 35,000 to 100,000 civilians were killed. That was one raid. The death toll of Iraqi civilians as a result of military intervention is estimated at up to 13,213 over 16 months by the website iraqbodycount.net.

But again, Dresden wasn't on television. Control Room drives home the media's role in modern war. One scene shows journalists indignantly reminding their military handlers this was a media war. It happened while they were squawking for a look at the famous playing card deck of wanted Iraqi leaders.

For its part, Al-Jazeera decided to focus on the suffering of Iraqis. In doing so, it aired footage of horribly wounded people that simply never showed up on North American TV networks.

Al-Jazeera outraged Americans when it showed footage of U.S. prisoners of war being interviewed by Iraqi TV -- and of American corpses piled on a tile floor.

Rushing said he was among those angered by the prisoner footage. Al-Jazeera had shown equally graphic images of Iraqi civilians who had been killed and wounded the day before in Basra. However, Rushing candidly admitted those images didn't bother him as much.

The divide between Western journalists and al-Jazeera is crystal-clear during the fall of Baghdad. While the Western journos are yukking it up and celebrating, the al-Jazeerans looked crushed. "Where's the Republican Guard? Where are the police?" one asked, while another muttered, "this is an embarrassment." The al-Jazeerans also saw the pulling down of Saddam's statue in Firdous Square as a staged event.

The major weakness in Control Room is while you see the network's staff and reporting, you don't see the commentary (the network's slogan is "The Opinion and the Other Opinion"). And that's the part that really has al-Jazeera's critics up in arms -- especially when the commentary becomes anti-Semitic. You can't really get a taste of it from its English-language website; it's been "westernized" for its audience.

Control Room isn't personalized in the style of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. When not interviewing people, Noujaim and her crew are flies on the wall -- a wise choice for this subject. The film has interesting characters and a brisk pace.

If you want to learn more about how the Arabic world gets its news -- both about itself and, more importantly, about us -- Control Room would be a good place to start.