THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
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The two language services are editorially separate. The English one’s choice of topics reflects the third-world interests of its viewers, concentrating more than its Western counterparts do on global poverty and the anger often felt towards America and the West. But it offers a wide range of opinion and covers Western politics well too. Both language services have bureaus in Jerusalem, Gaza and Ramallah (the Palestinian Authority’s seat), regularly giving Israelis a voice.
The Arabic service is a lot more controversial. Pro-Western Arab governments, particularly those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which denies Al Jazeera a bureau, repeatedly accuse it of bias. In particular they say it favours the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s chief opposition, and Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza and refuses to recognise Israel. The Arabic service’s head, Waddah Khanfur, and his news editor, Ahmed Sheikh, are both West Bank Palestinians said to enjoy cosy relations with Hamas. Many of the station’s Egyptian staff are deemed sympathetic to the Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a branch....
Al Jazeera’s anti-Western populism was strongly echoed at its recent forum on “the Arab and Muslim world: alternative visions”. Many speakers, denoting piety or loyalty to political Islam, prefaced their remarks with incantations of reverence for the Prophet Muhammad. On Palestine, not a single one of 200-odd invited participants spoke up for a two-state solution, apart from a clutch of doveish Americans; Hamas’s official one-state preference for the Jewish state’s abolition easily prevailed. A senior Hamas man waxed eloquent. If a representative of the Palestinian Authority, now in “proximity talks” with Israel, was present, his voice was unheard.
On Iraq, not a single speaker, apart from a forlorn parliamentarian from the Iraqi prime minister’s party who made a desultory comment by video-conference, expressed a flicker of sympathy for the new Shia-led order, which several voices denounced as wholly illegitimate. The Gazan who edits al-Quds al-Arabi, a populist London-based newspaper that resonates in the Arab world, drew the loudest applause with a ringing call to back the continuing Iraqi “resistance”, even though the fight is now almost entirely between Arabs. No wonder Al Jazeera makes pro-Western Arab leaders, excoriated as puppets, feel queasy—Qatar’s, of course, excepted.