Blood journalism
Eric Calderwood, a researcher of “Muslim-Christian relations in the medieval Mediterranean” writes in the Boston Globe about his take on Al-Jazeera…
Eric Calderwood, a researcher of “Muslim-Christian relations in the medieval Mediterranean” writes in the Boston Globe about his take on Al-Jazeera:
“… an all-day, ever-shifting drama that throws war in your face with all its gruesome cruelty. It is openly partisan, almost never showing Israeli deaths or injuries. It is also provocative and upsetting in a way that looks nothing like news in the West. Their broadcasts routinely feature mutilated corpses being pulled from the scene of an explosion, or hospital interviews with maimed children, who bemoan the loss of their siblings or their parents – often killed in front of their eyes. Al-Jazeera splices archival footage into the live shots, weaving interviews and expertly produced montages into a devastating narrative you can follow from the comfort of your own home.”
Al Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza, says Calderwood, “is news without even the pretense of impartiality.”
And, he argues, it’s also “a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.”
