I Just Watched...Control Room at 3:52 AM

I just finished watching Control Room; a controversial 2004 doc about the Arab language television news network Al Jazeera and its activities during the war in Iraq. Also covered quite finely in the film is the use of media by the United States Military during the war in Iraq to manipulate the information to always be biased to the American Cause. I will admit that this shocking documentary has certain elements of biased in it, but it should be noted that with any article be it film, print or otherwise, dealing with biased in the media, biased will always be present. Find out what I thought after the break.

What is it to show both sides of a war? To try to inform but still attempt to show how the veil is being pulled over the eyes of others through use of the media. It's hard and Al Jazeera generally tries to pull it off. Al Jazeera as a network attempts to show both side of major issues to its 50 million Arab viewers and I feel that they do a pretty good job at staying in the middle as much as possible. However this policy of trying to maintain as much truth as possible tended to go against the American Military which resulted the American Bush Administration actually labeling Al Jazeera as a terrorist station and both in Afghanistan and Iraq actually bombed their television stations.

Kay back on topic, Control Room for me wasn’t that shocking, I knew that the United States Military and the Bush Administration had been manipulating the media through the war in Iraq and Afghanistan but this serves as a neutral point of view where we the audience get to see it happen in front of us. We get to listen to the crap answers the military gave to reporters and on film get to see some of the messengers struggle with personal and ethical dilemmas. A lot of good back ground on Al Jazeera was interesting and filled in some missing points in the overall picture.

7/10