With the exception of the anchor Fakhry and a few two-ways with Latin America correspondent Lucia Newman in Miami, the team was largely white, male, and British or American. A woman reporter with Goldilocks hair and an Eastern European accent, who I can only guess must have been an intern to whom they tossed a mike, did make a brief appearance from Chicago early in the evening, but she then disappeared. Another woman with an indeterminate accent and breathless Gee-whiz-I’m-covering-the-election delivery popped in occasionally from Phoenix (who are these people?). But they were bit players in an Anglo-dominated cast.
My viewing companions—media professionals all—and I frequently found ourselves cringing in sympathetic embarrassment. At 7:05 p.m. EST, AJE rolled out a “Breaking News” graphic and we waited on the edge of our seats for a major development, only to be told by anchor Foster that it was “too early to call” Virginia. That’s breaking news? Moments later, they cut to Doha, where Santamaria parroted the catchphrase “the world is watching” as he stood in front of the video wall projecting a variety of generic “international” scenes. Unfortunately, several of those monitors contained nothing but color bars.
Technology aside, the most disappointing aspect of the coverage was that AJE did not play to its strengths. For the most part, we didn’t see “the world watching.” Where were those “global voices?” Where was that multinational corps of correspondents around the world? Having live correspondent whip-arounds may be a contrived device, but it does make good TV – and would have emphasized AJE’s supposed global perspective.
Why no roundtable of foreign ambassadors or international editors providing analysis from Washington? What about a panel of former foreign ministers? Why no live shots from election-viewing parties in Harare and Katmandu or a few presidential palaces? No matter how knowledgeable, four or five individuals cannot carry twelve hours of coverage. It’s unfair to them and to us.
At very least, why weren’t the overseas broadcast centers leveraged? London and Malaysia were AWOL. Instead of live interviews with global newsmakers, we got three quick, canned sound bites – “World Leaders Comment” – from former (not even current) Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, former (not even current) UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, and some guy from the “Re-Liberating Front” of Somalia (when was Somalia liberated in the first place?). They were recycled several times and looked like a product of the promotions department.
There were a couple of efforts that worked: a rooftop interview with experts in Beijing and a conversation with Afghan political figures in Kabul after the Obama victory was confirmed were effective, even if the Kabul segment looked like it was coming from a carpet shop (a conversation with the same group earlier in the evening had been mired in internal Afghan politics and way off the mark). A high point was a two-way with Bob Fisk, the Beirut-based correspondent for The Independent, who gave a no-BS assessment of what an Obama victory meant for the Middle East. Where was that same analysis from New Delhi, Jakarta, Moscow, and Buenos Aires?
Meanwhile, why weren’t the channel’s marquee names, like Riz Khan and David Frost, integrated into the special? Instead of recycling a four-day-old edition of Listening Post in the half hour before the polls started closing, why wasn’t Richard Gizbert on the set doing real-time analysis of how other media around the world were covering the election? Why wasn’t the host of Street Food watching events from the Seattle fish market? Etc., etc., etc. A little imagination would have gone a long way.
Instead, as one of our Arab students who watched coverage on both Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, which carried its own extensive broadcast of the election, put it: “That wasn’t Al-Jazeera. That was embarrassing.”
Lawrence Pintak sounds like someone who has grown up eating junk food suddenly being forced to eat organic vegetables. He just can't see the value in a product that doesn't provide that familiar saccharine hit.
To adapt one of his criticsms of Al Jazeera, why not ask whether CNN's hologram managed to "advance the story"? (and how many lost their jobs in order to fund that tasty but essentially pointless technology?) Did the relentless branding of commentators as "the best political team on television" really make it so?.
One of the founding principles of Al Jazeera has been to eschew the populist and glitzy techniques that have come to increasingly dominate TV news at the expense of real content. Indeed, our aim is explicitly not to leap on the populist bandwagon of infotainment. The people we talk to are not measured by their branding, or the effusions of a top PR team; our locations are not ranked according to how closely they resemble the bridge of the Starship Enterprise or the set of a Broadway show.
Al Jazeera presented a comprehensive reflection of how the rest of the planet regarded these elections. If this majority failed to express appropriate awe at the true majesty of U.S. democracy, and television technology, it was not our task to fill in the gaps with pageantry.
Posted by teymoor nabili on Wed 12 Nov 2008 at 11:54 PM
the best coverage of the elction night was on aljazeera english ,of course it didnt care about the numbers much cos they are not usa channel but they did care about very important issues like immigration and others so it was very good channel that night
Posted by mark on Thu 13 Nov 2008 at 07:57 AM
I watched the election coverage from Limerick City Ireland. We watched for between 4 and 5 hours. In that time we flicked between, CNN, BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera and RTE (Irish station). I can understand the criticism above but I wonder in some ways how do most viewers watch these things. With such a choice of channels, we tended to switch regularly back and forth. Thus I missed some of what Lawrence talks about above but I did see a rooftop discussion live from Tehran, on significance of victory which was different. I think the idea of locking into one channel for the night is unlikely so in some ways having a range of items and hoping some will stick is more effective. I found the studio analysis at CNN interesting but not riveting by any means.
Posted by Shane on Sat 15 Nov 2008 at 06:47 AM
Lawrence Pintak is an American? Because his butt's dying to see all news outfits to cover the US elections with that furious zeal. There are many other countries in the world than the US.
Posted by Carlos on Wed 19 Nov 2008 at 11:56 PM