Al Jazeera has just purchased Al Gore’s Current TV cable network for an estimated $500 million. Al Jazeera, you may remember, is a rabidly anti-american news broadcaster whose headquarters George W. Bush considered bombing in 2005. Current has been around for most of a decade but I only heard of it after Keith Olbermann got fired from MSNBC, so I guess ‘struggling‘ is apt.
Anyway, what’s wild is the reaction. First, the most predictable blowhard, Rush Limbaugh, running at the mouth this afternoon: “I wonder does this mean Joy Behar and Jennifer Granholm are now going to have to wear burkas and veils over their faces? If they do, it might help raise audience levels.”
More surprisingly, Time Warner Cable immediately responded to the deal by dropping Current, claiming they “did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera.” An odd play given the recent upsurge in visibility for Current and the worldwide popularity of Al Jazeera.
But what really made me laugh was the op-ed this move from Time Warner prompted the opinion desk of the Great Paper of Record to produce. The New York Times attempts to make something troubling out of the fact that Al Jazeera is “owned and financed by the Emir of Qatar”, whose relatively tiny yet affluent country harbours the “third-largest proven natural gas reserves in the world” as well as a United States Air Force Base, because
the emir, though he works closely with Washington on some issues, has interests and agendas that are sometimes at odds with United States interests.
In other words, a close US ally can’t be trusted since it sometimes isn’t in lockstep with our government. Good reporting, the Times, but could you elaborate?
Recently, for instance, Qatar along with other Arab nations is believed to have provided arms and other assistance to terrorist organizations operating in Syria.
Right! Selling arms to terrorists is real bad! Selling them to oppressive dictatorships flagrantly offending much-ballyhooed American values is legit though.
…the fact that [Al Jazeera] is owned by Qatar means that there is no guarantee of its independence.
Yes, and the fact that NPR is owned by America means there is no guarantee of its independence. And the fact that sun rose today is no guarantee it will happen again tomorrow. What guarantor of independence and objectivity owns the Times?
The board starts to wrap up an increasingly and inexplicably glowing review of Al Jazeera with this bit of dependent-clause praise: “In the Middle East, where good, independent journalism is hard to find…” Uh-huh. The Middle East is a place where good, independent journalism is hard to find.
So we’re surrounded by idiots, and some of them write for the New York Times. For more proof of that, just look at another trainwreck of an Alzheimeric rant from village intellectual David Brooks. After a ridiculously vague recounting of an anecdote that allowed for an any-analysis-you-like moral lesson, we’re blessed by a warning that some quotation Brooks chooses to use is ‘very french’ — twice. He closes out with a bumbling character self-assessment that glorifies clergy, Midwesterners, and “many great teachers,” followed by the only interesting paragraph in the entire piece which is 2/3 a quotation from someone else. Amazingly, this piece is somewhat better than another of his I was going to criticize last week but didn’t make the time for. That one was all the more painfully worthless given that he was writing against Charles M. Blow that day.