Now They Tell Us - My Thoughts

What Michael Massing is saying about the modern news media, or at least about its relationship with the government, is that it amounts to nothing more than a cheap condom. Its lies around harmless, is slipped on when needed, and is discarded just as fast. And I have to agree with him.
The New York Times especially lacked the balls to deliver any serious war reporting. They pulled all their punches during the march to war, and then made a pathetic attempt to save their image by printing a tepid letter addressing the fact that they’re really a bunch of pussies but are going to try to ask hard questions in the future.
At least Massing was smart enough to offer solutions to the problems he presented. He suggests that the major imbalance in modern news media is a lack of alternative perspectives. He suggests having more reporters on staff that can speak Arabic so that they can get a perspective from the Iraqi side of the conflict to counter the narrow view of the war presented by the American armed forces. This, I agree, would have made American coverage of the war much more informative and more on par with coverage from foreign news outlets.
What I found most intriguing in the book, though, was not Massing’s analysis of the media failure leading up to the war, but his description of the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera and how it was established. Apparently back during the cold war the Arab world was divided into two relatively easy to understand groups, the secular left and the religious right. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, somehow the secular left disappeared and religious extremists began to take their place. It’s quite strange. But now the Emir of Qatar is trying to use the money his country has amassed from its natural gas reserves to try and create a secular democracy, and one of the steps that was taken to help foster that democracy was the establishment of an all Arab news network. That’s how Al-Jazeera was born. Now, even though Al-Jazeera has been described as “the Arab fox news” it is still a strong alternative voice in the news media. It had people on the ground in Iraq from the beginning and was one of the only places to get an Iraqi point of view concerning the conflict. Also, its employees are composed of both religious and secular Arabs, which gives me hope that secularism can still somehow remain relevant in the region despite overwhelming pressure from extremists.