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| Fifth Column |
| BBC Plans al-Jazeera Competitor |
| 2004-06-24 |
| (EFL) The British Broadcasting Corp. said Thursday it will launch a 24-hour Arabic-language TV news channel to compete with the Qatar-based satellite station Al-Jazeera. Will the Beeb give their correspondents walking-around money to help stage attacks on US forces? The channel will be broadcast across the Middle East and Europe. Excellent -- now the tendentious self-hating poison of the BBC will be more accessible to budding jihadi recruits in the suburbs of major European cities. The BBC is hoping to rival Al-Jazeera, which has aired many of Osama bin Laden’s speeches and has been accused of anti-Western bias. Read that sentence again. One of the best, funniest, most depressing unintentionally insightful sentences I’ve seen in the media for a long time! The venture follows the recent launch of the U.S. government-funded Al-Hurra TV station, which has been denounced by some Muslim clerics as "propaganda." Note that al-Jazeera and al-Hurra are both accused of bias -- so I guess they’re the same. Sounds plausible -- a service launched by the most open society on Earth with the most free press is probably no different than a wildly unprofessional propaganda service originating in a region without a shred of objective journalistic values or experience. |
| Posted by:Verlaine |
| #3 #2 Al-Jeezra sometimes has pro-US stories, unlike the BBC. |
| Posted by: Chris Smith 2004-06-24 7:43:50 PM |
| #2 Reaction to headline: How are we going to tell them apart? |
| Posted by: someone 2004-06-24 7:17:00 PM |
| #1 I don't view the BBC as helpful in any way. It really would be a service to democracy if parliament would repeal the TV license fee and make these supercilious cretins compete for their living. It must be an Anglo-Saxon guilt complex that makes us fund snobs to look down their long inbred noses at us. |
| Posted by: RWV 2004-06-24 6:55:48 PM |