Al Jazeera
I’m still largely out of commission today, but the news never takes a day off. So I thought I’d throw this post open for your thoughts on the TV news coverage of the astonishing events in Egypt—in particular, on Al Jazeera English, which most of us (me included) can only see streaming online. While the Qatar-based network has owned the story of the demonstrations in Egypt and across the Arab world, AJE is still frozen out of most U.S. cable services, nervous about carrying a pan-Arab channel some have criticized as “anti-American.”
Whatever the channel’s leanings, newshounds are finding it a go-to source for coverage of the protests in the Arab world. Whereas a cursory flip through U.S. news channels this morning found heavy coverage of the Midwest blizzard, the court ruling on the health-care reform bill and, at one point on CNN, a move to make the whoopie pie the state dessert of Maine.
To be fair, though, there is also a lot of domestic coverage of the events in Egypt. As I type this, MSNBC is showing staggering footage of crowds in Tahrir Square. They’re airing AJE’s live feed.