Campagna on al Jazeera

Excellent and important piece in the IHT by Joel Campagna, senior program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, about the outlook for media freedoms in the new Iraq. Verdict: grim.

Campagna writes: "Press freedom is being put to the test quickly under Iraq's new interim government, and the outlook is dim. Last week, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari lashed out at Qatar's popular satellite news channel Al Jazeera and other pan-Arab broadcasters, accusing them of “one-sided and biased coverage” and warning that authorities were considering shutting Al Jazeera's Baghdad bureau. “We will not allow some people to hide behind the slogan of freedom of the press and media,” he said in an interview on Al Jazeera. Within days, the interim government said it had formed a media regulatory commission with the authority to restrict news coverage. Ibrahim Janabi, appointed head of the commission by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, told The Financial Times that Iraqi officials were drafting a list of prohibitions on news coverage. He singled out as offensive a broadcast by Al Jazeera and others of a sermon in which the Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr mocked Allawi as America's “tail.”

And Campagna draws exactly the right connections, or at least the ones that this old aardvark has been hammering on for the last year or two: "Al Jazeera has long infuriated autocrats across the Arab world with its unfiltered news and political debates. Arab governments have hurled tirades at the station, withdrawn diplomats from Doha in protest and harassed the station's correspondents. But in this case, the Iraqi government seems to have learned some troubling lessons from the United States, which has eagerly used its muscle against Al Jazeera."

The spin-off effects of America's clear disdain for independent media are devastating for any hopes of promoting democracy, liberalism, or reform. As Campagna puts it, "Leaders in Baghdad and Washington have the right to criticize news coverage. An open debate about these issues is healthy and certainly preferable to censorship. Yet these officials have shown little interest in engaging stations like Al Jazeera."

And this is a great point: "For instance, earlier this year the Coalition Provisional Authority compiled what it said was a list of false or misleading reports from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyya. But with the exception of a few cases, the authority never made the list public, citing the “sensitive information” it contained."

Campagna makes some great points here... couldn't have said it better myself!

Comments

[Jonathan Edelstein]

It just got even worse; Allawi banned Al Jazeera for a month.