Control Room Documentary an Eye Opener!

Control Room is an informative documentary about how the U.S. news networks and the Arab satellite news channel, Al-Jazeera, covered the early days of the war in Iraq. It is an eye-opening documentary which consistently solicits tough questions in the back of our minds. It captivates its audience in competing notions of truth and leaves one satisfied with the perception that if there really are two sides to every story; then this documentary puts forward an unparallel opening to scrutinize the other side and leave it up for its audience to make up its own mind.

Jehane Noujaim, director of Control Room, has eloquently cut her film to the finest benefit of the Arab network as the voice of the Arab browbeaten as well as the oppressed and to the apparent discomfort of the ‘occupying’ forces; the US. However, the director has also mixed small chunks of fiction in a way that reminded me that there can not be truly unbiased films once someone picks up a camera.

The documentary is surely a work of art that merely confirms what one already knows as it may be consoling. Control Room takes an angle that most Americans won’t share as it proves to be a much needed counterpoint for them in the context of the Bush administration propaganda on the Iraq war. While the documentary’s sympathetic portrait of Al-Jazeera gives out clear indication as to where Al-Jazeera is right and where the American government is wrong on certain Iraqi events. The reporters viewed in the documentary do not make preposterous Fox News claims of being “fair and balanced.” Control Room shows how propaganda works on both sides and how the truth is often somewhere in between.

Al-Jazeera, launched in 1996, was the first independent news channel in the Middle East, and soon became the most popular news channel with over 40 million Arab viewers. From Al-Jazeera’s perspective, Noujaim recalls the Bush administration’s changing rationales for invading Iraq, the use of fear in the media to manipulate public opinion, the juvenile deck of cards designating the most wanted men in Hussein’s regime, and the too-coincidental-to-be-accidental bombing deaths of three different Arab journalists on the same day by American planes. From Rumsfeld accusing Al-Jazeera of faking pictures of civilian deaths, Noujaim cuts to indisputable pictures of real victims from the American bombing.

Simultaneously, she also shows the Arabs engaging in wishful thinking about the foreseeable outcome of the war. She explores the controversy and hullabaloo of Al-Jazeera televising graphic imagery of civilian casualties and of American POWs. When Iraq finally falls, she shows the Al-Jazeera team’s shaken disbelief as they try to make their emotional response correspond to what they must rationally have expected all along. Still, when an American reporter asks an Al-Jazeera spokeswoman about bias in their reporting, she lucidly rebuts by asking whether the American media is biased.

The overall mood of Control Room is both frenetic and grim, especially when one of Al-Jazeera correspondents is killed, along with two other journalists, by an American rocket. However, the documentary also allows for a flicker of optimism as the cameras hardly ever leave Cent COM, the war itself, visible on video feeds and retrieved news segments becomes the backdrop for the main action, which is a series of rambling inconclusive arguments.

Control Room is a riveting inside look at how Al-Jazeera thinks and works. It gives you a feel for these journalists’ humanity, politics and sense of irony. It also shows how seriously they take their ethical responsibility for balance, even as many of the U.S. outlets that preach about this responsibility rarely practice it. In the words of an Al- Jazeera producer: ’Rumsfeld calls this ’’incitement.’’ Conversely, I call it true journalism.