Opinion

Al-Jazeera on Campus
Reflecting Cultural Diversity

By Carly Hawkins - Columnist

And the drama continues.
It sometimes seems as though the students of this campus are never happier than when there is something to complain about and believe me, I include myself in that assessment. I’m relieved to see we’ve kicked off the spring semester with another gem: the channels offered on campus cable.
Trivial? Maybe. There is, after all, the possibility that we may miss a few of the early season Cardinals and Cubs games. Not to mention the loss of HGTV, the Food Network, Oxygen, and the TV Guide channel. But I think the loss of Al-Jazeera due to the “possible” negative reactions from some unknown offended people is both troubling and emblematic of a bigger problem – the hypocrisy of censorship.
Having Al-Jazeera available on campus would have been an interesting experience. Its availability would have made for better and more informed global citizens. Is the network’s content occasionally unsettling and graphic? Yes. But so is late night HBO, which broadcasts what amounts to soft-core pornography. So is “Law & Order”, from time to time, and yes, that’s on network television. The fact that it’s fantasy versus reality shouldn’t matter and let’s not forget that a February 2004 poll reported by MSNBC showed that two-thirds of Americans support televising the execution of criminals in this country. Is Al-Jazeera a biased channel? Probably. But so is Fox News, and I can tell you I find the kind of things that Bill O’Reilly spouts off on more disturbing than the Iraqi propaganda machine sometimes.
When you get down to it, all American media outlets are propagandistic, too. No matter what, at the end of the day the GI Joes and Janes are the absolute good guys over in the desert where those ungrateful people are thanking our kind and generous gift of freedom with insurgency. We don’t like to believe that about what we see in this country, because we’re supposed to be better than that, what with the First Amendment and our free press and all. But we’re not. So how can we blame Al-Jazeera for operating in the same vein? Somewhere in between the two extremes is where the truth lies. And since no one is spoon-feeding that to us via half hour nightly newscasts, we had the unique and irreplaceable opportunity to do it for ourselves. That opportunity is gone.
For a city where a vast majority of the cars carry patriotic ribbons of some kind on their back end, and for a country where the support for sending troops to Iraq was substantial, we certainly seem to be scared of seeing what our friends and siblings and children and spouses are dealing with every day from the Middle Eastern perspective. And maybe that’s the point – they’re there so that we don’t have to see it every morning. But just as we got to choose not to join the military, we also would have had the remote control in our hand with dozens of other channels to watch. Instead, kindergarten-style, it’s been ruined for all of us.
I hope that John Ringle and Housing are serious about lobbying for Al-Arabiya’s addition to our channels in lieu of Al-Jazeera. It would put substance behind the words of this campus’ esteemed mission statement. For a few days there, when we were the only university in the country with access to the channel, we were living up to the pledge of “informed and concerned citizenship” and “reflecting cultural diversity.” If the university is unable to stand up for those principles, how can they expect to graduate students with a “productive commitment to improving their world”?

Al-Jazeera on Campus