In a recent New York Times interview, Jehane Noujaim, the director of Control Room, described her role as a kind of "glorified spy," meaning she's able to engage a sympathetic view of the Arab news network Al Jazeera and still hide behind the "filmmaker" moniker. It's only fair that Noujaim acknowledge her own position. After all, her documentary, Control Room, serves as a brute but convincing indictment of the US media: She contrasts the bungled reportage of so-called "embedded" American journalists with the more hard-hitting coverage provided by their Arab counterparts.
She makes a very persuasive case: In one of the most provocative moments of the film, senior Al Jazeera producer Sameer Khader alleges that when the US toppled Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, none of the cheering teenagers in the foreground had an Iraqi accent--meaning the US army had probably recruited teens from Egypt to mock-celebrate Iraq's supposed liberation. Indeed, the US has so much at stake that the government can't afford to not control the news media-which is why, as CNN correspondent Tom Mintier indicates in the film, the Army spinmeisters are so determined to bury the best leads.
The main shortcoming of Control Room is that, although it exposes many of the Machiavellian tactics employed by US journalists to justify their country's colonization of Iraq (in a colony, after all, any resistance to the imperial power is dubbed "terrorism"), it reveals very little about Al Jazeera's own operations. While the independent news network has, to its credit, been banned from several Arab nations for criticizing their regimes, it can hardly be called an objective source for truth about what's happening in the Middle East. Al Jazeera, after all, is based in Qatar; it's not allowed to criticize the Qatar dictatorship—even if it can scrutinize other governments. More important, the network does have an agenda, as Control Room makes clear. But, the film makes equally apparent, the rank partisanship and sloppy journalism of mainstream US media add up to a strong and more hidden agenda.
Reviewed
by Rachel Swan
12.12.04
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