So Al Jazeera International (their unofficial spokesman shown above...kidding. Well, not really) says they're "impartial and agenda-less." Reuters UK reports:
Far from aping the competition, Al Jazeera executives say they are setting out to be unashamedly different.
"We are launching at a time when the freedom of the broadcast media has never been under more pressure," says head of news Steve Clark, who spent 17 years at commercial broadcaster ITV and two years at Middle Eastern broadcaster MBC before joining the Doha, Qatar based broadcaster.
"I look at the U.S. and get dismayed by the lack of critical analysis of the Bush administration. Our job is to report impartially and without any agenda."
But wait, there's more big laughs from these crackpot terror-apologists who call themselves journalists:
The news channel, which is mostly targeting the 2 billion or so non-Arabic speaking Muslims around the world, will offer a different perspective, says managing director Nigel Parsons, a former director of Associated Press Television News.
"We'll report the same news, but we might report it differently," he says. "If we were reporting the war in Iraq we would call it an illegal invasion based on false information and without the sanction of the United Nations. During the war we would have called American soldiers invading forces and afterwards we would have called them occupying forces," he says.
Asked how a Palestinian suicide bombing in a crowded Israeli marketplace would be reported, Parsons remains adamant that different conventions would apply.
"We don't condone acts of terror, but we'd be very careful about labelling particular groups as terrorists. There are an awful lot of double standards and a lack of balance that is not coming from us."
Parsons' line on U.S media is similarly uncompromising.
"U.S. networks are mostly owned by big business interests and have come under tremendous pressure from this administration. They are akin to the Soviet media in the seventies."
Ah, yes. Very impartial and without agenda, that. There's just one thing this article didn't address, though: how Al-Jazeera International's Western inside men like Clark and Parsons sleep at night.
