The Right to Look by Nicholas Mirzoeff explains the central role of visuality in Western culture
OUR HISTORY AND THEIR ARCHIVE
The substantive visual aesthetics of Al Jazeera and its impact on the Arab world
By Khaled Ramadan
Published in: TransVisuality: The Cultural Dimension of Visuality
Abstract
This essay addresses how Al Jazeera operates between media activism and participatory informative/transformative design and how it could stimulate emotional awakening and social mobility across the Arab world, using visuality as a tool.
It briefly describes and analyses the visual and aesthetic aspects of the channel’s strategies and how the station’s politically motivated working methodology rely on a form of charged visual aesthetics that ultimately has led to developing a new Arab public.
The essay also addresses how the station’s tactics have led to the expansion of an infrastructure of visuality, forming the basis of a new broadcast aesthetic, while putting an end to totalitarian media typically associated with Arab regimes, thereby also ending the hegemony of Western controlled media in the Arab World.
“The goal of journalists is not to become friends with the powerful.
It is supposed to be getting information to the public.”Dean Baker,
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC.
Record of the Real
The Right to Look by Nicholas Mirzoeff explains the central role of visuality in Western culture and how it has been used as a tool of power. For Mirzoeff, this power in relation to the media has been central to the legitimization of Western hegemony across the world. He identifies three “domains of visuality” starting with plantation slavery, followed by imperialism/colonialism, and contemporary military campaigns, all empowered by visualization of history, done so in order to sustain authority through techniques of categorization, segregation and aestheticization of the so called Other.[1]
In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said problematizes the one-way communication practised by Western powers in relation to their colonial subjects through which Nature (the East – something to see and look at) is seen in juxtaposition to Culture (the West – knowledgeable and advanced, something to look up to). He explains how Western imperialism’s most effective tools for dominating other cultures has been literary of nature as much as political and economic, and traces the themes of 19th and 20th century Western fiction and contemporary mass media principally as weapons of imperial conquest.[2] Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto further argues in Real Virtuality that colonizers, when they no longer have physical spaces to conquer, turn to the colonization of heart and mind by conquering virtual space.[3]
The writings of Mirzoeff, Said and Yoshimoto suggest that carefully selected oral and visual content – transmitted through mass media – have the power to affect and, to a certain degree, control listeners and viewers. Identifying this as an imperial tradition further implies that mass media may be used in a battle for hearts and minds to gain influence that bear resemblance to imperial power.
Susan Sontag presents a similar view in her seminal text On Photography. For Sontag, the camera exists as a record or witness of the real and she questions whether we are affected by the camera’s visual representations, and if images can change, alter and transform us.
When exposed to images of suffering, what are we supposed to do with them, how do we live with them, and what do we learn from them? According to Sontag, images can invite us to form an attitude against suffering or pain. They can mobilize our consciousness and feelings, awaken our morality, and be used as an instrument of protest. In some cases, images can even agitate society leading to forms of direct action.[4]
Elaborating on the essentiality of visuality, Hal Foster, in Vision and Visuality, suggests: “The sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature to culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche”.[5] Rather than being seen as a neutral reflection of reality, thus, visuality should be regarded as an integral part of our social history with the potential to change society, which explains why it is used to influence thoughts and actions.
Re-writing Reality
This essay focuses on the history and impact of historic events related to the media industry in the Arab world, zooming in on Al Jazeera’s distinct audio-visual methodology, its broadcast aesthetics, and the network’s overall visual identity.
The sources are based on different readings and references, up to date information from the internet and social media, as well as audio and video interviews I carried out in Doha, London, Dubai and Beirut between 2009-2013. These interviews were carried out with prominent figures in the Arab media industry, among them anonymized sources from Al Jazeera itself.
The title I chose for this essay is taken from a known TV program by the Qatar-based Pan-Arab TV station Al Jazeera. Our History and Their Archive questions the authenticity of Arab history, how it has been subjected to colonial norms of documentation, and why the acknowledged history, including the history of visuality of the region, has been taught, archived and documented mostly by European scholars. The TV program attempts to re-write Arab history by and for Arabs themselves, preferably by using cameras, microphones and living witnesses. Such original recordings are used to give a more authentic and uncorrupted ‘record of the real’.[6]
What the program indicates is that Al Jazeera is not an entertainment channel, nor is it strictly journalistic. The station portrays itself as a critical entity reforming the media industry, while in practical terms, it uses audio-visual journalist accounts as a vehicle of mobilization and transformation in order to politically reform the Arab World.
Colonial Visuality in the Arab World
As part of their foreign policies, Western TV and radio (originating in the UK, France and the US) have been broadcasting audio-visual material to the Arabs in Arabic since the end of the Second World War, thereby subjecting Arabs to serious influence of Western norms and values.[7]
This relentless broadcast illustrates well the points made by Mirzoeff, Said and Yoshimoto, namely, that colonial and post-colonial powers have used and continue to use media dominance to construct oral, visual and written accounts that undermine the identity of (post) colonized subjects, while strengthening their own role and position.[8]
About twenty years ago, before the era of satellite TV and the establishment of Al Jazeera, Arab populations had limited televised alternatives. The post-colonial airwave spectrum was dominated by authoritarian state-owned TV stations, next to several Arabic speaking Western TV and radio stations. As Hal Foster suggests, visuality involves both body and psyche and has an immense impact on our way of thinking and acting.[9] Hence, Arab audiences were impressed by the spectacular visual representations on Western TV stations and partly subscribed to Western values televised to them in local languages. This contributed significantly to how the Arab world has understood its collective identity over several decades, with Western media largely occupying a hegemonizing and colonizing force within the media landscape, structuring Arab visuality, recollection and media within an imperial narrative.
De-colonizing Arab Airwaves
The marketing of Western politics has long been a priority for media outlets operating in the Arab world. Hence, the raison d’être was not to change or mobilize Arabs, because that would have put an end to the post-colonial experiment.
This is an example of the role of visuality in legitimizing Western hegemony across the world, following writers such as Mirzoeff and Said,[10] as Western control and dominance over the media spectrum has aimed at regulating the Arabs and keeping them in an immobile and non-transitional position. Edward Said describes this phenomenon of communicating with the Arabs without actual communication as a colonial practice, originating with the Western disregard for those subjugated to imperial influence.[11]
Feeling the void, Arab populations started looking for an Arabic media that would address their collective interests and defend their history. The answer came in the 90’s with Al Jazeera. The station was born in the midst of drastic technological changes and in an exceptionally aggravated time of the media industry, where TV stations across the world competed over notions like independency, neutrality, reliability and responsibility. Recognizing the emphasis put on visuality as a vehicle of emotional and political control by Western countries, Al Jazeera developed its own journalistic and geo-political agenda. In order to serve the interests of the Qatari government that owns the station, and its larger aspirations for the Arab world, Al Jazeera developed a distinct broadcast methodology of non-edited and highly charged footage, supported by strong visual and graphic messages.
The station practically put an end to forms of signal colonialism by de-colonizing the Arab airwave space, and in a second step introducing participatory methods to news-making, offering the Arab audiences a new tradition of visual aesthetics and a new Pan-Arab TV, by the Arabs, for the Arabs.
Shortly after adopting the Arab causes, especially the issue of Palestine, Al Jazeera sought to create informative messages broadcast through a distinct populist methodology, and in so doing the station managed to attain a significant viewership in the Arab world as well as the Arab diaspora living abroad and in the West.[12]
Visual Mobilization
Although the population in the Arab world has been watching TV ever since it was introduced, the impact of politicized TV on Arab viewers only crystallized after the launch of Al Jazeera. With a clear political media agenda combined with the spectacularity of ‘real images’, the station was active in the transformation of the Arab audiences from passive viewers to active protesters. This was due to the fact that Al Jazeera understood better than any other TV station the power of visuality, its impact, and how to emotionally provoke Arab viewers in order to mobilize them.
For the past twenty years, the Arab world has been exposed to massive visual influences that in volume exceed the influence of its entire post-colonial history. With new visual codes continually being inserted and mixed with the reality of the region’s socio-political conditions, Arab audiences are not only prepared to receive strong footage and images, but also to react upon them and engage with them on their own terms.
In the uprisings that took place from Tunisia to Syria, Arab people have practically confirmed Sontag’s argument of how images can affect, agitate and mobilize society, leading individuals to take action and control their own destiny.[13] The analogy of the camera as the record or witness of the real is not a theoretical argument for Al Jazeera, but a practical dogma. The station shows reality as it is, including the harsh visuality of conflicts and wars.
Images Starting and Stopping Wars
From the historical archive of postmodern media, we have seen how an image could stop a war. In 1968, it was war correspondents Peter Arnett and Eddie Adam who captured on their cameras the urban execution of Vietcongs during the Vietnam War. After being aired in the US, the footage triggered public outrage and with this event, the Vietnam War came to an end.[14]
However, if images can stop a war, can they also start one? In the Arab world images played a significant part in producing the domino effect of multiple uprisings across the region. It happened with the well-known mobile phone footage of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in 2010, filmed by his cousin who uploaded it to YouTube, and sent the link to Al Jazeera.[15]
The visualization of this tragic event was unprecedented within Arab society, as Arabs do not recognize or value suicide for social or economical reasons, which was the case with Bouazizi. Still, after receiving the footage, Al Jazeera kept reporting and broadcasting it over and over again. The footage of Bouazizi in flames protesting the living conditions in his country ignited an uprising that the world, still today, is coming to terms with. Later, the imagery became the iconographic symbol of all Arab uprisings, known in the West as The Arab Spring. Bouazizi’s portrait was used on posters celebrating the uprising. In 2011, the Tunisian government honored him with a postage stamp.[16] The same year, Times Magazine named Bouazizi person of the year, making him a symbol of ‘The Protester’.[17]
The event and its aftermath brought about an argument between Arab and Western media, regarding ethics and value definitions, in juxtaposition to how, why and when to televise or aestheticize strong visual material, when is it useful and when it can be considered offensive.
Almost all Western mainstream media outlets chose not to air the footage of Bouazizi. For Western media, broadcasting such images was a question of morality and an unpleasant visual brutality for their audiences, and therefore not newsworthy. For Al Jazeera, however, the footage of Bouazizi in flames was not as much about visual spectacularism, as it was about broadcasting footage that was visually evolutionary, revolutionary and newsworthy.
Here it can be argued that the Bouazizi footage was not televised on Western TV stations for political reasons, but the stations that chose to televise it, like Al Jazeera, did so for political reasons as well.
Susan Sontag poses the key question in this situation regarding what the viewer is supposed to do with such images and the feelings they incite.[18] Al Jazeera televised it to demonstrate the social, economic and political suffering of Tunisians, hoping that by broadcasting this footage, they would trigger something more powerful.
The Visuality and Aesthetics of Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera, in particularly the Arabic channel and its website, has become well known for televising and displaying non-edited violent images from conflicts and wars. Screening images of Arab people experiencing immeasurable suffering and pain has become part of the station’s visual identity.
After being deceived by what can only be described as imperialistic and totalitarian TVs for years, Arab viewers needed to see the non-manipulated reality on TV. Al Jazeera provided this type of viewing experience and in so doing it brought with it a new wave of visuality, combining the use of aesthetics, spectacular graphics and supporting music.
As an example of the impact of the visual messages for viewers watching Al Jazeera Arabic, Elrafie Bashir wrote an article entitled “Us, Al Jazeera and Zionism”, published on the Al Jazeera Arabic website in November 2011. In it, he describes how terrible one can feel when watching Al Jazeera and how that translates to a sense of pain and suffering to the viewer:
I feel worry and grief, I find myself unintentionally irritated and indigenized. My blood boils, it crashes in me everything beautiful, authentic and noble, I feel tragic, sorrow and collapsed. I feel severely limited of positive thinking, it reduces my performance and slims mental challenges to my life, which already is a heavy burden. And there are millions like me in the Muslim and Arab world.[19]
In light of Bashir’s analogy, a hypothetical but valid question remains: what if Al Jazeera Arabic had chosen not to televise the Bouazizi footage? Would the Tunisian uprising have succeeded without Bin Ali’s government silently crashing it? This is rather unlikely, because after Al Jazeera televised the footage to every home in the Arab world, it was later picked up by other TV stations, and the world was notified about Bin Ali’s crack down on protests, which eventually led to his fall.
The interesting observation here is that Al Jazeera English chose not to televise the Bouazizi tape, but reported the event with strong emphasis and accompanied the broadcast with footage of protesters clashing with police across Tunisia. Here, Al Jazeera made a clear distinction between its Arabic audiences and its English speaking audiences. Al Jazeera English chose to follow the visual norms and procedures of mainstream Western TV stations, simply by tuning down strong images and replacing real images with graphic representations.
This, however, does not mean that Al Jazeera English did not see the tragedy within the footage of Bouazizi as newsworthy. On the contrary, it was Al Jazeera English that kept televising the evolving events in Tunisia well before Western TV stations seriously started to pick up on the events. Al Jazeera and other Arabic media outlets considered the Western media’s decision to ignore and delay the coverage of the events in Tunisia (later on in Egypt) as a selective and politically motivated act. With delays and non-visual coverage during the first two months of the uprisings taking place across the Arab world, Western media left an impression among Arab audiences of silently backing dictators like Bin Ali and Mubarak, simply because it would better suit the colonial history and political agenda of the West.[20]
Eventually, when English speaking audiences started to tune into Al Jazeera English and stations like the English speaking Iranian Press TV, which were actively following the brutal images of the evolving events, stations like CNN and BBC, which were barely broadcasting any footage of the uprising in the weeks prior, started to realize that their audiences were getting information from other more up to date media sources.
Twitter, Facebook, Radio or TV Revolution – or simply a visual evolution?
When Western media started to catch up on the events taking place across North Africa, they initiated a massive campaign claiming that social media was the true reason behind the Arab uprising. At the peak of the Tunisian uprising, The Listening Post program on Al Jazeera English interviewed Marc Lynch from George Washington University, who took the role of a moralizer, correcting and analyzing the act of Western media. During the interview, Marc Lynch explained that the uprising in Tunisia did not fit the Western media’s political interests:
Later on the vast majority of Western media find themselves attracted to a superficial narrative, excited about Twitter and Facebook, because that fits in the pre-existing stories about technology, a sign that only few people working for the Western media understood what was taking place in Tunisia.[21]
Another Al Jazeera English program, Inside Story, was questioning if it is possible to talk about Twitter as a tool of freedom and if social media can be credited for the events across the Arab World. Jillian York of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University took this as an offensive statement distorting reality. One of her arguments is that in Egypt, less than 25% of the population has internet access. Similarly, Twitter accounts are limited to 14,642 distributed between Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt, which has 88% of these accounts.[22]
Virtuality vs Reality
During the uprisings all four Arab dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen attempted to disrupt and interrupt the internet and mainstream media, but the action worked to their disadvantage. Without TV, internet or mobile signals, people were left with only one choice, to go to the streets.[23]
At the conference Cyber Activism, Changing the World? at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, May 2011, Courtney Radsch from the Freedom House Organization in the US stressed that revolutions do not happen on the internet, but rather within urban space. Social media just helps activists organize, publicize and mobilize their causes.[24]
The question is why the media in Europe and the US insisted on profiling the regional uprising as a Twitter revolution. Can this kind of flawed reporting be more newsworthy than the actual events? Courtney Radsch thinks that mainstream media, especially in the US, thought of social media as a ‘sexy’ story to credit, but also that they attempted to make the story more interesting by focusing on social media rather than the events taking place in the streets.
Mohammed Al AbdAllah from the International Center for Journalism also disagrees that this was a Facebook revolution simply because most people who were at the Tahrir Square in Cairo did not even know that Facebook or Twitter existed, let alone have integrated smart phones with these social media readily in place. Instead, Al Abdallah argues that social media was a tool of information, but did not give people the political motivation to go on the street.[25]
The Audio-Visual Campaign
In Egypt, people went into the streets after the government cut internet access and jammed TV signals. Thus, the question becomes: who mobilized the people and how did they do it? This role was left to Al Jazeera, which kept viewers on alert around the clock by broadcasting on different wavelengths and bombarding them with live footage of the violent events using hidden cameras placed within different locations throughout Egypt, Yemen and Libya. Al Jazeera kept sending its daily campaign encouraging people to post footages and images of all sorts of events. People were listening and frequently sent material to Al Jazeera. The station broadcasted the user-generated content it received or found on the internet, without very many restrictions, profound in-depth investigative reporting, or attribution to source credibility. This act, in turn, led to several reporting errors (admitted by Al Jazeera itself) and aggravated the relationship between so-called citizen journalists and mainstream media on issues like copyright, reliability of content or its sources, and footage quality.
Hence, social media was indeed a tool for protesters, but only to coordinate efforts and report what was taking place. It did not encourage or provoke people to revolt in and of itself. It was the charged footage and reporting of Al Jazeera, the collective will of the activists, and the brutality of the governments that eventually mobilized the people.
Another efficient tool Al Jazeera Network had at its disposal was Radio Al Jazeera. The station knew that Arabs usually tune to the radio in times of crisis because power cuts make the radio the only news source available.[26]
People were tuning in to Radio Al Jazeera and other regional radio stations, which paradoxically were not interrupted. Obviously, the regimes in place at the time regarded the impact of visual / televised messages as much more dangerous. Particularly in the case of what Al Jazeera was telecasting, they were very right.
From Image to Action
Al Jazeera applied special effects to some of the video, audio and animation material received, resulting in strong visual representations that were powerful enough to rally and awake the emotion Sontag describes.[27] Witnessing the direct impact of this visual policy on streets throughout the Arab world, Al Jazeera started to nourish such images by encapsulating them in provocative and interventionist reporting, eventually scoring a highest number of viewers, more so than any other Arab TV station. Powerful charged footage became part of the station’s visual identity, after manipulating them graphically and airing them without warning (most of the time).
This act, however, is still restricted to Al Jazeera Arabic. Al Jazeera English conveys a totally different image. The station makes a dramatic distinction when it caters for its Arab viewers and readers and for its English speaking audiences.[28] Arguably, Al Jazeera English is a part of Al Jazeera Network and ought to reflect similar views and styles. In reality, even the website of Al Jazeera Arabic is raw and not as sophisticated as that of Al Jazeera English, which is becoming the more advanced and in line with what Western audiences have come to expect. On aljazeera.net, the Arab audience is met with a significantly different expression from that of its English sister site aljazeera.com, not only in content, tone and news priority, but also in the visual representation, graphics and aesthetic format.[29]
According to Philip Seib in his book Al Jazeera English: Global News in a Changing World,[30] the Qatari government enjoys the way its station attracts a new English speaking audience and politically supports the English branch, which benefits from the activist profile of Al Jazeera Arabic, although the broadcast of Al Jazeera English is much more mainstream.
Using media to gain control over Arab airwaves and winning the minds and hearts of Arab and Western audiences can be seen as an attempt to fight the continued influence of former colonial powers of the West as described by Mirzoef, Said and Yoshimoto.[31]
Regardless of Al Jazeera’s favouring tendency in the political conflicts of the Arab world, and how much the Qatari government views it as a democratizing tool, no one disputes how Al Jazeera has managed to expand the visual infrastructure and broadcast aesthetics of the Arab World, attesting to the powerful image of the real. In the midst of the Arab Spring, Arab society is still heavily exposed to a large dose of charged images and footage provided mostly by stations like Al Jazeera. In spite of this repeated routine, the daily visual dose has not normalized or customized Arab audiences to this kind of imagery, as one might expect. Instead, Arab society proved false the visual equation stating, ‘the more you watch, the less you feel,’ rephrasing it to something more along the lines of ‘the more you watch, the faster you act’.
The relatively new but rapid development of visuality has given the Arab world a different interpretation and understanding of media sociology. The way Arab media and particularly Al Jazeera has applied the new tools of visuality has led to an enhanced sense of civic responsibility and eventually to the expansion of the social and political concernings within the entire region.
Our Archive – Our History – and the blind spot of politicized journalism
The emotional impact of Al Jazeera on the Arab populations has been phenomenal. The majority of people in the Arab world still views Al Jazeera as their hope for a forward path free from colonialism, totalitarianism and oppression. Furthermore, the impact of Al Jazeera does not stop with the Arab population. However, with its current broadcast methodology, Al Jazeera’s endeavour cannot remain an aesthetic issue only. An urgent ethical question must be posed: can being pro-uprising or encouraging revolution (even against a dictatorship) create forms of biased reporting or does this constitute fair journalism?
Here is a quick reminder of Dean Baker’s statement: “The goal of journalists is not to become friends with the powerful. It is supposed to be getting information to the public.” The question here is, should journalists be informing the public or does their responsibility lie in help liberating the public? Al Jazeera as well as the rest of the Arab media today suffers from syndromes it shares with many of the world’s media outlets: the lack of accuracy, decency and responsibility in what they choose to show and what they choose to omit to their viewers. This beckons one to question what happens outside the frame of Al Jazeera and other Arab media, and how these potential narratives could impact the representation and visuality of Arab media and their collective identities, memories and histories.
There is a big difference between TV stations that simply cannot resist the temptation of being themselves the centre of events and stations that wish to report from the centre of events. Consequently, the position of Al Jazeera lies today at a crossroad between these two choices: being a transformative news agency against the protracted route of practicing a politicized form of journalism while sustaining it with moral goodness, ethically palatable stories and feel good narratives. Some critics of Al Jazeera (though few) are questioning the network’s interventionist policy, it’s ethics and it’s aesthetic methodology. These critical voices are largely those of insiders working within the station itself, abreast to the inner mechanisms of the station’s politics and ways of doing journalism.
I would like to end this article with an observation. Although most programs on Al Jazeera are verbal talk shows, the station’s most effective weapon is arguably the highly charged images that constitute its visual identity. The station has managed to expand the infrastructure of visuality by introducing new broadcast ethics and aesthetics, in turn mobilizing the people of the Arab world by relying not on words but rather on images.
Finally, a confirming quotation by James Fallows. In 1984, he showed how TV images overpower speech with a story about a CBS journalist doing a report on President Reagan: Reporter Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes had documented the contradiction between what Reagan said and what he did by showing him speaking at the Special Olympics and at a nursing home while reporting that Reagan had cut funding to children with disabilities, while denying funding for public health. After Stahl’s reporting was broadcast on CBS, she received a phone call from a White House representative, who applauded the report. Surprised by the compliments, she asked the White House official why he was not displeased, pointing out that her reporting had cornered the president. The official replied laughing: “You television people still don’t get it. No one heard what you said. Don’t you people realize that the picture is all that counts? A powerful picture drowns out the words.”[32]
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[1] Mirzoeff, N. The Right to Look (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011)), pp. 473-496
[2] Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, New York, 1993), pp. 282-303.
[3] Yoshimoto, M. Real Virtuality in Wilson and Dissanayake (eds): Global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary. (Duke University Press, Durham, 1996).
[4] Sontag, S. ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 1973), pp. 3-24.
[5] Foster, H. ‘Preface’ in Hal Foster (ed) Vision and Visuality (Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 2. Seattle, Bay Press, 1988) p. ix.
[6] In accordance with Susan Sontag’s understanding. Sontag, S. ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 1973), pp. 3-24.
[7] These include BBC Arabic based in Britain, the Arabic Panorama Radio based in Paris, and the Arabic Voice of America – supposedly one of the world’s most trusted sources for news in the Arab countries – among others.
[8] See Mirzoef, Said and Yoshimoto.
Mirzoeff, N. The Right to Look (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011)), pp. 473-496.
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, New York, 1993), pp. 282-303.
Yoshimoto, M. Real Virtuality in Wilson and Dissanayake (eds): Global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary. (Duke University Press, Durham, 1996).
[9] Foster, H. ‘Preface’ in Hal Foster (ed) Vision and Visuality (Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 2. Seattle, Bay Press, 1988) p. ix.
[10] See Mirzoeff, N. The Right to Look (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011)), pp. 473-496.
[11] Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, New York, 1993), pp. 282-303.
[12] According to Allied Media, Al Jazeera claims 40 million viewers in the Arab world alone.
Allied Media Al Jazeera Television. Viewer Demographics. [online] Available at: http://www.allied-media.com/aljazeera/al_jazeera_viewers_demographics.html Accessed 2 June 2013]
According to Andrew Hampp at adage.com, web visits surged past 66 million in April 2011 – 42% from the U.S. Hampp, A: Al-Jazeera English Looks to Build Audience Before Ads [online] Available at: http://adage.com/article/global-news/al-jazeera-english-build-audience/228094 [Accessed 2 June 2013]
[13] Sontag, S. ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 1973), pp. 3-24.
[14] Adler, M The Vietnam War, Through Eddie Adams’ Lens (WGBH, US 2009) [online] Available at: http://www.wgbh.org/News/Articles/2009/3/24/The_Vietnam_War_Through_Eddie_Adams_Lens.cfm [Accessed 2 June 2013]
Also see Peter Arnett To War with Eddie Adams (digitaljournalist.org 2004), [online] Available at: http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0410/arnett.html [Accessed 2 June 2013]
[15] See for example Ryan, Y The tragic life of a street vendor (20 Jan 2011) [online] Available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/01/201111684242518839.html
[16] Revolution for Freedom and Dignity – stamp set from Tunisia (Stamp News International, www.stampnews.com, April 2011)
[17] Andersen, K. Person of the Year 2011, The Protester (Time Magazine, Dec. 2011)
[18] Sontag, S. ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 1973), pp. 3-24.
[19] Bashir, E: Us, Al Jazeera and Zionism (Al Jazeera Arabic website www.aljazeera.net, 8 November 2011, [online] Available at: http://www.aljazeera.net/mob/6c87b8ad-70ec-47d5-b7c4-3aa56fb899e2/bbb3f965-9c60-4737-8ca0-ac5025802e04 [Accessed 15 May 2013])
[20] This interpretation supports the observations made by Mirzoef, Said and Yoshimoto.
See Mirzoeff, N. The Right to Look (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011)), pp. 473-496.
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, New York, 1993), pp. 282-303.
Yoshimoto, M. Real Virtuality in Wilson and Dissanayake (eds): Global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary. (Duke University Press, Durham, 1996).
[21] March Lynch on The Listening Post (Al Jazeera, 22 January 2011, [online] Available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2011/01/2011122103121600656.html [Accessed: 15 May 2013])
[22] Statistics according to Source Sysomos referred to in the program. The tool for revolution? on Inside Story (Al Jazeera, 10 February 2011, [online] Available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2011/02/201121010514154634.html [Accessed: 15 May 2013])
[23] Ramy Aly, Research Fellow of Social Networking in Egypt, Sussex University. A multi-media uprising? on Witnesses (Al Jazeera, 1 February 2011, [online] Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/02/201121124120857925.html [Accessed 15 May 2013])
[24] Radsch, C. Paper given at the conference Cyber Activism, Changing the World? (The Royal Library, Copenhagen, May 9, 2011)
[25] Mohammed Al AbdAllah, Intational Center for Journalists (ICFJ). A multi-media uprising? on Witnesses (Al Jazeera, 1 February 2011, [online] Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/02/201121124120857925.html [Accessed 15 May 2013])
[26] Courtney Radsch, Mohammad al-Abdallah and Jillian York. The tool for revolution? on “Inside Story” (Al Jazeera 10 February 2011, Available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2011/02/201121010514154634.html [Accessed 15 May 2013])
[27] Sontag, S. ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 1973), pp. 3-24.
[28] Also see journalist and media critic Habib Battah’s evaluation of events in ‘Mad About Al Mayadeen’, interview with Ben Jeddou, Middle East Broadcasters Journal , November/December 2006, published in: The Beirut Report. An Inside Look on Lebanon, the Middle East and its Media. [online] Available at: http://www.beirutreport.com/2012/06/mad-about-al-mayadeen.html [Accessed: 15 May 2013].
[29] To give an impression of the different appearance of the two sites, here is a description of Al Jazeera English (www.aljazeera.com) and Al Jazeera Arabic (aljazeera.net) on 16 May 2013.
The web page of Al Jazeera English opens with a still image from a TV report showing US Secretary of State John Kerry together with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The meeting is set in an official reception room with golden furniture, Persian carpets on the floor, and flowers on a nearby table. The two men are looking calm and friendly although their straight posture in the golden chairs indicate the seriousness of the events. Next to the image is an explaining text and links to related stories. A click on the headline or the image itself takes the visitor to the actual report, which is accompanied with a long background article.
Under the still image on the front page is a row of images linking to other international reports. All the images are clear, showing people in ‘daily’ situations (a meeting between Obama and Erdogan, the UN assembly, President Obama addressing people, a colorful Bangladesh woman with her child, and smiling football players in the field), and all are held in warm colors. Images illustrating other featured stories are clear and contain many portraits, and the international categories are of general interest to most viewers. The page itself is held in white, orange and grey and all image links are highlighted with a warm orange frame. The layout of the page is straight and organized and gives a warm and clear framework for the interesting looking content.
The web page of Al Jazeera Arabic opens with a collection of continuously playing image series. The series show dead children with blurred faces (commemorating the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’ of 1948), armed people at war, a devastated bombsite in Iraq, and Israeli soldiers firing at Palestinian protesters.
The page is held in white and blue colors giving the page a cold appearance. The accompanying text is small and hard to read, and the image links to other stories are pale and smaller than those on Al Jazeera English.
The English website links to interesting, ‘feel good’ TV reports. The Arabic leads to unsettling image sequences without much explanation. The English focuses on international news that may interest Western audiences. The Arabic focuses on international news that may appeal more to Arab audiences.
[30] Seib, P. (ed) AJE in the World in Seib, P. (ed) Al Jazeera English: Global News in a Changing World (Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2012), pp. 187-198.
[31] See Mirzoeff, N. The Right to Look (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011)), pp. 473-496.
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, New York, 1993), pp. 282-303.
Yoshimoto, M. Real Virtuality in Wilson and Dissanayake (eds): Global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary. (Duke University Press, Durham, 1996).
[32] Hoenisch, S. Image over Substance (Criticism.Com, 4 November 2005 [online] Available at: http://www.criticism.com/md/cult1.html [Accessed 15 May 2013])