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JESSE OF JAZEERA: JESSE
MESNER-HAGE '05 WORKS FOR THE ARAB NEWS SERVICE
As an English major, Jesse Mesner-Hage, from Montpelier,
Vt., was spending his junior year away from Haverford in Egypt,
studying colloquial Arabic, not sure what he was going to do with
it, but certainly thinking of writing, producing, or directing:
“That’s when I first saw the gorgeous Al-Jazeera
logo on television, and noticed the reverence people in the street
had for it—a news service that told the truth as the Arabs
saw it.” Mesner-Hage remembers patrons in cafes or shoppers
looking at TV in appliance stores, seeming almost reverential. Because
despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s and U.S. military
brass denouncements of Al-Jazeera broadcasts, they were
not anti-American, simply objective. If allied bombing missions
killed Iraqi civilians, Jazeera showed the bodies, as opposed
to the increasingly timid CNN, or the shrinking major networks’
coverage (American reporters and cameramen were being killed and
injured, too, by roadside bombs, but there was no corresponding
push to report that the Iraq war was being lost).
Al-Jazeera and the somewhat less-trusted
Al Arabia news service from Saudi Arabia (because the House
of Saud’s double-deals with the Americans often alienate other
Arabs), are seen as the two most penetrating news sources in the
Mid-East. Jazeera, at least, seems genuinely fired by old-fashioned
news-for-news’ sake motives. Originally the creature of the
BBC and the Saudi Royal Family (1995), it quickly collapsed for
being too independent and uncontrollable, reporting on bizarre Saudi
state-beheading practices (of recalcitrant thieves or adulterous
wives, for example), by actually televising one. BBC quickly pulled
its financial plug, but by the next year the young, eccentric billionaire,
Sheikh Hammad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, had bankrolled
the whole enterprise, and Al-Jazeera was outstripping everyone
in the Mid-East in thorough coverage. When the Iraq war broke out
in 2003, Al Thani’s reporters and producers suffused the story,
supplying context for the American military’s and civilian
support teams’ actions—the “Weapons of Mass Destruction”
and biological weapons rationales, for instance. The State Department
and White House got daily thumpings two years before the New
York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC,
ABC, and CBS weighed in with the “news”
that WMDs and bios had largely been expedient casus belli
rationales.
As a result, and because it was being favored as a
media outlet for Bin Laden and Al Queda (filmed terrorist interview
tapes were being released to it exclusively), Jazeera’s
Baghdad office was closed for a month in 2004, by the U.S.–backed
Interim Iraq Government, and it had to rely on other services’
friendly reporters, and work as best it could from outside the city.
Al-Jazeera had also reported that there were 700 civilians
killed in the brutal battle for Fallujah in April, 2004, and regularly
broadcast true numbers of the American war dead–(2,563 currently)–something
that caused then Secretary of State Colin Powell to call Jazeera
“horrible and slanted,” and Donald Rumsfeld to brand
its journalism “inexcusable.” Those numbers were not
showing up elsewhere. ABC to this day lists American fatalities
by name on its Web reports, but doesn’t stress total KIA’s
frequently.
For a while, in the name of journalism verité,
Jazeera came close to broadcasting atrocity journalism,
but seems to have pulled back on the ghoulish cadaver shots favored
by Arab news services like Al Manar from Lebanon. Al
Iraqiya and Al Hurra, backed by the Americans, are
much milder, like domestic war coverage within the U.S. Abu Ghraib
prison coverage, a worldwide lead broadcast, wasn’t mentioned
on Hurra for three to four days. Lately, however, with
anti-war sentiment rising at home, both Iraqia and Hurra
showed extensive footage in which two Army specialists, one from
Texas and the other from Oregon, were kidnapped by insurgents after
having overrun their checkpoint, and tortured in ghastly ways that
made identification difficult.
But just in terms of big business, the world media
has settled on the Middle East as a prime place to report, and so
beefed-up bureaus from Germany and the BBC are in the works, and
all the original Arab media TV and radio services are thriving.
And it is at just this point that Al-Jazeera decided to
open an English-language Washington, D.C., bureau (Jazeera
reports in the Mid-East and elsewhere in the world in Arabic, sometimes
with a translated crawl at the bottom of the screen). When Jesse
Mesner-Hage saw the announcements for the American bureau, around
winter break of his senior year, he immediately applied for a job:
“I didn’t think about it for a minute being ‘controversial’
or anything else. I think the misperceptions about Al-Jazeera
are from sheer lack of information about it,” he says now.
[He was notified he’d gotten the job just days before graduation.]
“When people begin to see it [it’s scheduled to begin
operations in the fall], they’ll be amazed at the fresh way
in which news, opinion, sports, etc. can be presented. I’m
not an official spokesman or anything, but I can generally say that
our broadcasts will be free of the sound-bite culture people have
come to associate with television reporting. We’ll do longer
takes where warranted. You’ll see opinion unaffected by the
administration’s point of view…We’ll also try
to look at stories from the perspectives of our four main bureaus
[in Doha (Qatar), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), London, and Washington,
plus reports from throughout Latin America. It’s very exciting,
and I think it will be rejuvenating for other broadcast media.”
One thing Mesner-Hage particularly likes is the youth
and diversity of the newsroom staff: “Looking around me I
see a girl from the Ukraine, some West End Brits, a lot of Americans…don’t
want to repeat myself, but it’s uplifting, hopeful, and very
exciting, man.”
So far he’s seeing Al-Jazeera from
the ground up. He’s had some opportunities to help with research,
to edit, to assist with interviews, to nibble around the edges of
producing:
“What? My friends and family? Entirely supportive.
Everyone’s been pretty cool.”
— John Lombardi
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