Not Necessarily the News

Control Room takes us to the front line of culture, war, and that consumer beast known as the news. (Film Review)

By Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: A significant achievement in an already banner year of non-fiction film.

The Downside: It will be no stranger to controversy.

Rationality will not save us.

    -Robert S. McNamara

    With the advent of radio, television, and the internet, information has become a key battleground of the new Millennium.  Not just where it comes from, but how it should be shaped, manipulated, and presented- and for the benefit of whom.  More and more the idea of "agree to disagree" is becoming an arcane dinosaur while pundits, politicians, and arm-chair political quarterbacks have adopted a strategy and line of thinking that would only feel at home in a religious crusade; we are righteous, we are good, convert to our way of thinking or suffer the consequences.

    As one person in Control Room, Jehane Noujaim's eye-opening documentary about the Arab Al Jazeera news network, laments, the days of moderate political views are sliding behind us.  As the post-9/11 United States is gripped more and more by a fevered Fox News-inspired nationalism and as the chaotic Middle East falls prey to reactionaries afraid of social progress, the voices of those who would favor a rational approach to geopolitics and culture are being drowned out in favor of racial epithets and wide sweeping dismissals of any line of political thought that even smacks of moderation.  The American news media, which used to be a trusted stalwart of observation into the American Condition, has become in the words of some, a "Level One" patsy- a system by which other entities can filter their news and their agendas to the American public with little or no control. 

    Control Room is not about the American media, but rather it makes an effective mirror displaying what the media is as opposed to what it could be.  The Al Jazeera news network was kicked off in 1996 as a progressive voice for Arabs in the Middle East and has found itself in the middle of a maelstrom of competing world views.  It has become both a sensation and a pariah; the former to Arabs who scrounge meager resources just to construct antennas to pick up its daily broadcasts and the later to Middle Eastern governments who get into fits when it exposes the seamier and less human side of their political system.  Since 9/11 and the beginning of the US war against Iraq in 2003, both President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have both accused Al Jazeera of being biased in favor of Islamic fundamentalist radicals.  Those same Islamic fundamentalist radicals, in turn, have accused Al Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece and puppet for the Bush Administration and Western ideology.

    There is just no pleasing some people.

    Control Room centers on the days leading up to the March, 2003 attack on Iraq and the American military operations inside that country to its pseudo-resolution with Bush giving the "mission accomplished" speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May; a moment in history that has now become more self-satiring than anything The Onion could cook up.  All of this is done through the lens of Al Jazeera with its network base in Qatar and correspondents at United States Military Central Command (CentCom). 

    Is there a bias in the way Al Jazeera presents its view of the war in Iraq?  Yes, of course there is.  But the point of the movie is not to apologize or excuse, but to remind us that information, in almost any form, is subjective.  By any rights, there is and should be no such thing as a completely objective news source and a movie like Control Room is a painful jab at anyone who takes "fair and balanced" journalism to mean "you agree with everything we say."  During one part of the film, we are shown contrasting images; casualties among the American military and Iraqi civilians who have been killed or maimed during the offensive.  One U.S. Marine Spokesman, Jt. Josh Rushing, at first tows the party line in dealing with more aggressive news correspondents at CentCom who want answers to their methodological questions about the war rather than status updates and propaganda posturing.  However, in one quiet moment, Rushing solemnly admits to his differing reactions to what he has seen on Al Jazeera; revulsion at the sight of American dead, passing discomfort at the sight of Iraqi dead.  This cuts to the heart of what may be the biggest misunderstanding to develop in the past four years; while people may argue that our actions in the Middle East are not a war of cultures, culture has found its way into the debate.  Many members of Al Jazeera depicted in the film are hardly anti-American (one expresses his belief that the American system will correct its mistakes, one half-jokingly admits that he would take a job with Fox News in a heartbeat just to give his kids the chance to grow up in the US) and what Rumsfeld has repeatably labeled as a bias towards the extinct regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is anything but.  Instead, it is an at-large feeling similar to what Rushing spoke of; disgust at the suffering of those of a similar culture, faith, and world view.

    There is almost a sadness at the center of Control Room.  It gathers an eclectic group of people into its view; Americans, Arabs, British, and the like.  People like Rushing.  People like Al Jazeera producer Samir Khadir who chastises a program manager for bringing on a blatantly anti-American "political activist" onto a news program in lieu of someone with any real ideas and, most importantly, the capacity to discuss them fairly.  The sadness is that Control Room presents people like Rushing and Khadir as a breed that is dying out fast in this day and age; people who hold fast to their beliefs, but who are willing to approach the beliefs of others with curiosity rather than suspicion.  Control Room ends almost like a tragedy, with the death of an Al Jazeera correspondent whose base of operations (which had been reported to the Department of Defense in the days prior to the war) was "accidentally" bombed by American A-10s, perhaps or perhaps not coincidentally a few days after Rumsfeld railed against their news coverage.  "We got the message," Khadir says darkly, on the verge of tears.

    Control Room will feel like a salve for those with a mindset to question what seems to be news and information today designed to be nothing more than propaganda for an administration embarrassed by its own mistakes, yet found the in-your-face approach of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 either too aggressive or too untrustworthy.  Control Room has its own take on things, to be sure, but it is a quiet film.  It doesn't take part in the events going on around it; it simply sits and patiently waits for real human beings to reveal those things that make them human.  A