Everyone (well almost, as noted earlier over in China and the readers of many biblioblogs don’t) knows that Egypt cut the internet off and Americans rose up with others around the world and decried the oppression.
But what about here in the United States? Aren’t our own media guilty of caving in to pressure from somewhere in rejecting the legitimate place of Al-Jazeera to be viewed on the air? Why, in other words, has Al-Jazeera been blacked out across most of the United States? Why can we see the speck in Egypt’s eye while ignoring the beam in our own.
Canadian television viewers looking for the most thorough and in-depth coverage of the uprising in Egypt have the option of tuning into Al Jazeera English, whose on-the-ground coverage of the turmoil is unmatched by any other outlet. American viewers, meanwhile, have little choice but to wait until one of the U.S. cable-company-approved networks broadcasts footage from AJE, which the company makes publicly available. What they can’t do is watch the network directly. Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. – including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. – cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egypt attempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting. The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has been a surge in traffic to the media outlet’s website, where footage can be seen streaming live. The last 24 hours have seen a two-and-a-half thousand percent increase in web traffic, Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English, told HuffPost. Sixty percent of that traffic, he said, has come from the United States.
Al-Jazeera provides excellent and fair coverage of every issue they report. It should be as available as CNN and Fox and all the other major news suppliers.
Readers can demand Al Jazeera English here. Here are the contact pages for Comcast, Time Warner and DirecTV.
