John Miller, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University (Rye High, in some circles), reviewed Hugh Miles' 'Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged The World' for The Globe and Mail on March 26.

I review the review! :)

Chronicling the way Al-Jazeera used courageous journalism to build itself into perhaps the world's largest and most popular television news network would be story enough. But Hugh Miles has crafted a better one here: a careful journalistic examination of who's right, the governments who claim Al-Jazeera is an agent of terrorists or the great mass of Arab and other viewers who think Al-Jazeera is the most accurate news organization in the world.

Miles, an award-winning British journalist, reaches a measured but believable conclusion. Al-Jazeera has given sympathetic coverage to Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghanis, but it "is probably less biased than any of the mainstream American news networks," and covered the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq better than anyone.

First of all, I wonder if John Miller had access to al-Jazeera during the Iraq war and if he did, is he fluent enough in Arabic to follow its coverage. Also, John (who is a good guy) has not -- to my knowledge, covered the Middle East as a beat.

If he's just going by A-J's English website, be aware its tone is quite different from the Arabic version, according to articles I've seen.

Miles makes many unflattering comparisons between the principled journalistic decisions made by Al-Jazeera and the uncritical jingoism of the U.S. networks. No Al-Jazeera anchor would do what Fox network anchors did and wear Old Glory lapel pins on air. No Al-Jazeera executive would censor content at the request of a government, as Fox owner Rupert Murdoch did when he said, "We'll do whatever is our patriotic duty."

Miller might do well to see the film Control Room (he may well have; if he did, it isn't clear from this review).

Here's an excerpt from my review for CTV.ca:  The divide between Western journalists and al-Jazeera is crystal-clear during the fall of Baghdad. While the Western journos are yukking it up and celebrating, the al-Jazeerans looked crushed. "Where’s the Republican Guard? Where are the police?" one asked, while another muttered, "this is an embarrassment." The al-Jazeerans also saw the pulling down of Saddam’s statue in Firdous Square as a staged event.

The al-Jazeera staffers interviewed for the film admitted their Iraq coverage was skewed to showing the suffering of Iraqi civilians. Certainly that part of the story was underplayed by the U.S. TV news crews, but it also nicely played into the concerns and worldview of A-J's target audience.

In The Guardian's review of Miles' book,  reviewer James Buchan (a veteran Middle East correspondent) pulled out the following passage from Miles: "Never once in the 21 days of conflict did al-Jazeera acknowledge that invading Iraq had anything to do with democratisation: it was a colonial conflict."

But from reading Miller's review, you might think A-J has no worldview. In fact, he quotes Miles as saying: "The contradictory nature of the complaints ... showed there could be no substance to the allegations of bias."

Or there could be some allegations backed by evidence and some spurious ones that were nonsense.

Here's an excerpt from a Feb. 6 NYT article on Who's Who in the Arab World:

Al Jazeera's journalists have always fashioned themselves as defenders of Arab identity, but increasingly, the network also casts itself as a champion of Islamic values. It is planning to launch an English-language channel this year, ostensibly to reach Western audiences but more importantly to reach English-speaking Muslims in Asia and in the West.

Miller talks about reportage by A-J, but again, one of the things that has people up in arms about the station is the inflammatory  -- and dare I say anti-Semitic -- nature of some of its commentary.

That's largely why it had such ridiculous restrictions put on it by the CRTC even though it is broadcast uncensored in Israel!

However, Miller's review doesn't really get into that.

Anyway, here's the big finish:

Miles argues that the U.S. harassment of Al-Jazeera is racist and does a disservice to Americans, many of whom still believe Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 and that the invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terror. "Nobody in any other part of the world thought like this," he says.

Many in the Arab world rejected the notion that Muslims were involved in the 9/11 attacks. One conspiracy theory held that 4,000 Jews stayed away from work at the World Trade Centers on that fateful day. I'll have to read the book to see if Miles documented A-J's refutation of that. No review I've seen has addressed it.

(Miles) places the blame squarely on the drift toward celebrity journalism and the decline in reporting on world affairs. "Devoid of history, analysis or intelligent comment, the American public naturally has no idea about riddles like Iraq or Palestine, and so it is no wonder that Al-Jazeera looks like the bearer of bad news."

That's certainly part of the problem. Large swaths of the U.S. populace are quite ignorant of foreign affairs and are quite deferential to authority figures.

But Buchan notes in the Guardian that Miles is the son of Oliver Miles, "a former Arabist ambassador who has sharply criticised the Blair government's policy in Iraq, Hugh Miles has inherited the old mandarin contempt for American public policy in the near east."

(Miles) quotes an Al-Jazeera executive with an even better explanation. The problem has always been Al-Jazeera's habit of broadcasting the news without first trying to ask the Americans.

There's likely some truth to that. I suspect the U.S. government appreciates a free and independent news media that freely and independently subordinates itself to American interests. :)

The U.S. has played deadly hardball with A-J: Miller notes it attacked A-J's bureaus in Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad, the latter attack leaving one journalist dead.

If you read Amy Goodman's Exception to the Rulers, you'll find out the U.S. wasn't exactly kind to independent, unembedded journalists of any type in Iraq or, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan.

But merely attracting the U.S.'s ire doesn't make A-J a teller of unadulterated truth either, but frankly, I'm not in  a position to judge.

Right now, I'm wishing I was someone who was fluent in Arabic and who had been living in the Middle East for the past 15 years. But I'm not. I don't know if Buchan speaks Arabic, but he is an old Middle East hand. Here are the last two grafs of his review:

There is no doubt that a new public is being created in the Arab world, similar to that made by the transistor radio 50 years ago and exploited by Gamal Abdul Nasser's Saut al-Arab ("Voice of the Arabs"). Cairo Radio galvanised what used to be called the Arab masses, and shook those stately kings and presidents in their airport lounges before leading the Arabs to defeat in war in 1967.

Arabs themselves like to say that they think of their honour before their liberty or even the material comforts of their lives. In that case, al-Jazeera seems to me less a force for democracy in the Arab world than for a vibrant Arab nationalism of a neo-Nasserist or even - why not? - a neo-Saddamist character. This nationalism may bring freedom and prosperity in its wake. All we can say is that it didn't last time.