Robert Kaplan on Al Jazeera

By John Ballard

 Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic via 3 Quarks Daily.

...Al Jazeera is forgivable for its biases in a way that the BBC or CNN is not. In the case of Al Jazeera, news isn’t so much biased as honestly representative of a middle-of-the-road developing-world viewpoint. Where you stand depends upon where you sit. And if you sit in Doha or Mumbai or Nairobi, the world is going to look starkly different than if you sat in Washington or London, or St. Louis for that matter. By contrast, in the case of the BBC and CNN, you are explicitly aware that rather than presenting the world as they find it, those channels are taking a distinct side—the left-liberal internationalist side—in an honest and fundamental debate over foreign policy.

Halford Mackinder, the turn-of-the-20th-century father of modern geography, stated that provincialism is very useful, since it prevents the tyranny of the wider, geographical majority. What Mackinder feared, writes one of his biographers, W. H. Parker, was the horizontal organization of the world according to class and cultural and ideological tendencies. Instead, Mackinder promoted a vertical organization of the world by regions and localities. And so, just as American states and individual counties curtail the power of the federal government, other news outlets in various parts of the world may pose the only defense there ever will be against Al Jazeera, which, excellent as it is, has its own developing-world perspective.

Unfortunately, the BBC and CNN don’t have so much a different viewpoint from Al Jazeera’s, as a similar philosophical outlook that is more weakly and dully presented. Then there is Fox, with its jingoistic, meatloaf provincialism straight out of an earlier, black-and-white era. Could Fox cover the world as Al Jazeera does, but from a different, American-nationalist perspective? No, because what makes Fox so provincial is its utter lack of interest in the outside world in the first place, except where that world directly and obviously affects American power. What use does Fox have for Niger River rebels or dispossessed Indian farmers? Thus, we are left with the insidious despotism of Al Jazeera: and it is despotism, because we have really no other serious news channel to turn to.

Comments

[SRW1]

Thus, we are left with the insidious despotism of Al Jazeera: and it is despotism, because we have really no other serious news channel to turn to.

So the guys who have been around for ages and thought that they own this patch of television real estate can't quite match the (relative) new kid on the block and Robert Kagan calls it despotism. Does he even stop to wonder how foolish this crap is.

A bunch of non-western guys get tired of how western-centric the World is presented to them, and, as they have the resources, they decide to do their own thing. And then, horror, oh horror, they have the audacity to not only present events from their own point of view, but they do it better than the established guys.

Where Kaplan is correct though, is in the overall quality assessment. The way this plays out at the moment, Al Jazeera bests BBC World. CNN isn't worth bothering with. Not if your world doesn't end at the borders of the US of A and you're not into the kind of anchor personality cult CNN oozes to the point of nausea. Fox? Dare offering Fox to an international audience!

[geoff]

I admire your tenacity to be able to read anything in The Atlantic. Since it's turn right and its new attention deficit format, even though I have a subscription, I avoid the mostly predictable short visions allowed by its editors. Kaplan's impression that the BBC, as available in North America, represents "the left-liberal internationalist side" strikes me as a remarkably silly statement. BBC isn't Fox but, again as it is presented here - only I think - in North America, it presents not an internationalist view but an American view I'd classify as CNN from an earlier day.

[John Ballard]

To be fair to Kaplan, his use of the term "despotism" is somewhat exaggerated, equating despotism with coercion. He makes an Orwellian reference in his final paragraph.

George Orwell intimated in 1984 that purity can be a form of coercion, and in that respect, I find Al Jazeera’s moral rectitude disturbing. Because its cause is that of the weak and the oppressed, it sees itself as always in the right, regardless of the complexity of the issues, and therein lies its power of oppression. But I will continue watching Al Jazeera wherever I can, because I find it so riveting compared with other news channels. And if my politics crawl to the left as a result, that will be yet more evidence of just how insidious Al Jazeera’s influence is.

Kaplan doesn't mention it, but I sense a similar echo of "moral rectitude" in the reactionary tendencies of the astro-turf crowd, which has switched from Koolade to tea.