Why You Can’t See Al Jazeera in the US – What is this? Cuba?

try finding this on your TV at home….

Al Jazeera did a fantastic job of covering the uprising in Egypt.

Of course, no one in the US would know that… because it isn’t possible to even watch Al Jazeera, unless you want to do it online.

Why is that?

The reason is that no US MSO (Multiple System Operator) will carry Al Jazeera.

People may think that television is an open and democratic system wherein the viewer gets to choose what they want to see.

Actually, this is not the case.  Before the viewer gets to choose, the MSO gets to choose what the viewer will be able to see.

The two biggest players, Time/Warner and Comcast control about 65% of the cable systems in the country, Drill down to the top 5 and you’re at about 90%.

Not one of them carries Al Jazeera.

How come?

They certainly carry a plethora of other crap, most of it with far lower viewership and far worse content.

In fact, Al Jazeera’s content was pretty good.  In fact, during the uprisising in Egypt, it was outstanding.

How come?

Well, most of Al Jazeera’s correspondents actually speak Arabic.  This is a big plus when you are coving something happening on the streets of Cairo.

In the US we like to ‘fly in’ our ‘correspondents’ to ‘big foot’ the story.

Katie Couric and Brian Williams were right there in Cairo as things were  happening. That is, until they turned a big more ‘real’ and Brian Williams and Katie Couric hot-footed it out of Cairo as quickly as they had flown in.  This is why I put ‘correspondents’ in quotes.  Overpaid TV stars would probalby be a better term.

Meanwhile, the real journalists – the ones wandering the streets with notebooks or video cameras in their hands, were in the thick of the action and reporting quite well and accurately.

American news organizations have a real aversion to this kind of stuff.  They like the ‘star’ system instead.  The uneducated stars.  The ones who don’t know the history, the culture, the language or the locals.

This is the kind of drivel that the networks feed us daily.  It is what Neil Postman called ‘the illusion of knowledge’.

Case in point:  We have now been in Iraq for 9 years.  How many Iraqis do you think have video cameras or cell phones with video?  Maybe a million? Maybe 10 million?  In all those years, how much Iraqi video footage have you ever seen on US network news?

Would ‘none’ be a good answer?

A long time ago, TV Marti was one of my clients.

The idea was to beam honest television journalism into Cuba – a repressive and closed soceity.

Maybe we need a bit of TV Marti here in the US.

Or maybe we just need a few network news executives and MSO operators with some courage.