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Control Room: Gender Bias In News Media

Decent Essays

Control Room places an emphasis on an Arab news network’s coverage of the war between Iraq and the United States that began in 2003; the news network is known as Al Jazeera. This news network was founded in 1996, and had been called by the Bush administration “the mouthpiece of Osama bin Laden” (Noujaim, 2004). From what this film had depicted, the viewer can see that Al Jazeera is a news network worthy of attention, and not only because of its controversial topics, but because of the information it releases to the rest of the world that most do not regularly see due to biases within news media outlets. Because it appears clear that biases are imminent within the film, I had become more interested in how and why Al Jazeera had become such a tainted name within the industry and under fire for the information they bring to the masses. …show more content…

They have been known to show full broadcasts of Osama bin Laden’s transmissions or instances where civilians have been held hostage and the footage is rather gorey (Lynch, 2005), but this is something that the public needs to see and not be shunned away from. One might say that their Arab values are being used as propaganda through the spreading of war imagery that can be seen in Control Room, but the same could be said for American television networks. Samir Khader, program editor for Al Jazeera, had said that the American media is there to “defend the values of (these) people” (Noujaim, 2004) under the Bush administration, so it appears that Arab nations are not the only nations with news networks aimed to spread their own

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