Exclusion in the Media

I remember cruising the al-Jazeera English web site a few months ago, and finding a story that I was shocked not to have read in the Western media. Immediately following the shoe-throwing incident that you may all remember during a Bush press conference in Baghdad, the 'attacker' was imprisoned and allegedly tortured, breaking a bone during his stay in prison. That same day the story did receive some media coverage on CNN and Fox, but the story was very different. What was being reported was that the assailant had written a letter to the President asking for his forgiveness and pardon. Both stories are probably true, but how is it that such a development could have been totally overlooked in the Western media? I have developed a general impression of al-Jazeera being a less biased source of news than many American sources, CNN being the one that I use the most often. I find that foreign sources, such as the BBC and al-Jazeera have excellent US coverage, and international coverage that far outshines our domestic media.

Today I found myself on the VOA web site, the electronic incarnation of Radio Free Europe, which was founded in part by Dewitt Wallace. Obviously, this source shows a heavy pro-US bias, as it is funded and administered by the Federal Government with a recent focus on targeting Afghani, Iranian and Iraqi audiences. One of the top stories on the front page detailed the admission by a UN official that many of those employed by UNRWA schools in Gaza are members of Hamas. (click the post title for the article) The Unites States alone provides about one hundred million dollars per year in funding to the UNRWA, a substantial source of income for those living in the region. Following up, I performed a search on al-Jazeera and Google news to find coverage of the event from other media sources. To my surprise, I wasn't able to find anything about the issue in any foreign or US source. The only place that I was able to find a reference to the incident was on an Israeli web site, Aish.com. (I can't get the link thingie to work, so here's the url: http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/mediaobjectivity/UNRWAs_Hamas_Employees.asp)

A few years ago I got my news exclusively from one or two sources, mostly CNN and MSNBC. I always had an assumption that the news was the news, and that any reputable media outlet provides a different version of the same truth. I've wised up a little bit since, but I have still yet to find any single news source that has broad enough coverage of the Middle East to be individually sufficient. I don't think there is one. I suppose that inherent in any media group is a shared perspective, and inherent in a particular perspective is the exclusion of others.