U.S. Censorship of Al Jazeera.

Seeing a revolution or a war unfolding live on television is always fascinating and somewhat exciting and in many ways the protest-revolution in Egypt has reminded me of the Revolutions in Eastern Europe, (particularly in Romania where television played a crucial role).

Of all television coverage on the events in Cairo, Al-jazeera’s has been the most interesting one, mostly because it offers a different perspective a but also because it is the most watched tv channel in the Arab world. Much has been said about the importance of online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook - whose role may have been exaggerated in the West - but these are only available to the young in the -upper-middle-class whereas most Egyptians are informed through satellite television and not the net.

Al Jazeera has done such a good job that it has been specifically targeted as their bureau in Cairo was shut down and their network’s licenses and accreditation cancelled or withdrawn.

This is not the first time that they have been banned, restricted or threatened by autocratic Arab regimes since they started broadcasting in 1996 - in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and even Kuwait.

But until this week, I had never realized that the reason I can watch Al-Jazeera is that I do not live in the United-States where it has been banned from the largest cable networks.

As Frank Rich pointed out in his excellent Op-Ed in the NYTimes this week:

… in America, it can be found only in Washington, D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner — offer it.

This week the director-general of the Al Jazeera network wrote an interesting article in Newsweek which caught my attention. In it, he underlines the contradiction between the much claimed free press concept in the West and the refusal to provide “alternative viewpoints” to the American audience.

Of course, as always in the West, the censorship is never direct but it is sugarcoated with commercial reasons like :

… the insistence by U.S. operators that Americans are not interested. From a commercial standpoint, they argued, Al Jazeera was not worth their precious bandwidth. (Newsweek)

Of course, Al Jazeera claims otherwise – and they seem to have figures to prove their point:

Tony Burman, Al Jazeera’s head of strategy for the Americas, said traffic to the satelite network's English-language website, where a live stream of its broadcast is available, increased 2,500% during the past week of Egypt coverage. He said up to 60% of the traffic was from the United States. (LATimes)

The « commercial reason » is moot (more here) if you consider the loads of useless crappy channels available on U.S. cable tv anyway.

In reality American broadcasters are afraid of the fearmongers on the right like Bill O’Reilly who brands the Arabic channel “anti-American” and “anti-Semitic” – which shows his utter ignorance since Arabs are semitic people -. Of course, this accusation would be propagated by Islamophobic Foxnews. After all, this view of Al Jazeera was first promoted by officials in Bush administration when they didn’t like the graphic footage from the war in Iraq. There have even been allegations of a memo in which president Bush speculated about a U.S. bombing raid on Al Jazeera world headquarters in the Qatari capital and other locations.

More generally this virtual ban of Al Jazeera in the United-States is the “consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America”.

Of course, the Qatari channel is at times critical of US and Israeli policy – it may also show crude images of wars but it has the merit of giving another perspective and an Arabic insight which might help Americans (who are willing) understand a bit better what the Arab world is about.

In any case, before anything else it should be a question of principle. Freedom of expression cannot stop at what makes you uncomfortable. If Al Jazeera is available even in Israel, why not in the United-States?

It is time for Americans to do at home what they ask others to do in the world for credibility sake.

Sarkozy, Bush : the Imperial Presidencies.

French president Sarkozy has never been shy of his admiration for the U.S. and for G. W Bush, and he has often called - wrongfully, in my opinion - "the American" because of his professed admiration for the U.S. (here or here) - its energy, optimism and weak trade unions.

But there is something else Sarkozy liked about G. W. Bush, it is his handling of journalists. Indeed, there is an eerie parallel between the current French government and the Bush administration in their illegal use of the power of the executive to monitor and intimidate journalists and their sources, which basically aims at killing investigative journalism.

France's most respected newspaper Le Monde has accused the French counter-intelligence agency (La Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur or DCRI) of illegally monitoring their journalists and informant calls in violation of the law.
The Sarkozy government actually identified and sacked one advisor to the justice minister who had supposedly been leaking to Le Monde information about the Bettencourt scandal after obtaining access to the phone bills of the journalists who revealed the scandal. The French newspaper filed a complaint as this is directly in violation of the "news source Secrets Act", (here) recently voted in France:

“The law is absolutely clear,” read a Le Monde editorial: the legislation, it quoted, says that “the confidentiality of journalists’ sources is protected in the exercise of their mission to inform the public.” (MacLaens)

This week, however, the Office of the Prosecutor (i.e. le parquet), which is supervised by - and thus highly dependent on - the French Department of Justice (Ministère de la Justice) announced no action was taken about their complaints as the offense was not penalized :

Le parquet de Paris a classé sans suite la première plainte déposée par le quotidien Le Monde pour violation du secret des sources dans le cadre de l'affaire Bettencourt, a-t-on appris vendredi auprès de son avocat.
Le parquet, qui a rendu cette décision mardi, a notamment fait valoir que le délit de violation du secret des sources n'était pas pénalement sanctionné, a déclaré Me Yves Baudelot, à l'AFP. (AFP)

Now Le Monde has brought a civil suit which will be examined by an investigating judge (juge d'instruction) who can conduct investigations into serious crimes or complex enquiries independently and outside the province of the executive branch. (AFP)

This is not the first major scandal of the Sarkozy presidency (see the Karachigate for instance) and you might say that all governments are tempted to go astray in their use of this awesome power given by the executive. But one thing that Bush and Sarkozy have in common is that this abuse of the Executive power is backed by their view of politics and society, and there autocratic tendencies of bush and Sakrozy is nothing new (see here, here, and here or even here)
This is in line with the conservative beliefs that a good society can only function if the people accept that unquestionable authority, obedience (by the people), and punishment (for disobeying authority) prevail over cooperation, transparency, and the rule of law, as the law (i.e. 'judges') limits the power of the Executive and therefore its efficiency. In other words, they deny a tenet of democracy : check and balances, and they believe that direct universal suffrage give them the authority over anything and anyone. It is almost within a limited term, they were given the power to act as tyrants.
Of course, leftist governments have also abused their power (Mitterand in France or Clinton to some extend), but those abuses was not backed up by their claimed ideology whereas conservative presidents emphasize values that undermine democratic principles.

This is why, I guess I'll never be a true conservative.


NOTE: Reporters Without Borders establishes a ranking of countries in terms of their freedom of the press and as you can see on the map below, the countries where press was the most free were Finland, Norway, Ireland, Sweden and Denmark, whereas France and the US rank similarly (in gray-blue) in the 2nd -less free- group. (Wiki)