Kind of slow in the beginning, but it really comes together when they start with the fake news cast. Peppermint Gomez rules. So do the illegal immigrants stealing our blonde teenagers…that might have come out wrong.

I love the Daily Show.

Frankly, I did not find the videos to be very funny.

Samantha Bee implies in the first video that Al Jazeera’s problem is that it’s too much like PBS–too serious, substantive, and highbrow. If that were only true! Her one-joke routine shows her trying to jazz up the station by introducing a trashy, Fox TV sort of style. So, Al Jazeera is quality while American TV is all Fox-type trash. Uh huh.

My problem with Al Jazeera isn’t about style, however, it’s about content. When I was in Morocco recently, I was able to watch a bit of Al Jazeera. Although it was in Arabic, I got a hint about how biased it could be. This was in early November, around the time when some women in Gaza served as volunteer human shields, surrounding a mosque in Gaza where some fighters had holed up after launching attacks against Israel. The women enabled the fighters to escape Israeli return fire by sneaking out behind them.

It was interesting to note that practically the only scene the station showed was a five- or ten-second clip of these women (all identically dressed or nearly so) running and screaming while gunfire sounded in the background. Once or twice there was a brief shot of a presumably Israeli helicopter, as well as one of a tank, but these were rarely shown, lasted a nano-second, and looked suspiciously like stock footage. For 99.999 percent of the time, you saw that same footage of the women, over and over again. It was the whole Al Jazeera image of the story. It seemed to be the whole Al Jazeera story, period.

To get an idea of the point of view behind Al Jazeera, you should read this recent interview with the editor-in-chief of the station (link given below). Pay special attention to the end of the interview, where he explains why many Arabs (including himself) especially hate Israel. You can access here:

http://www.worldpoliticswatch.com/article.aspx?id=395

Or you might want to look at an Al Jazeera news segment that was broadcast last June. In it a reporter follows around a Hamas-sponsored brigade as its members prepare and conduct terrorist attacks against Israel. The report has a sympathetic “our boys at the front” perspective. At one point, the reporter makes supportive comments as he watches brigade members launch rockets into Israeli territory. Nice. You can access the video by going to the following site.

http://memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT

It should take you to the search page at memri.org. Where it says “clip #,” in the upper right corner, just type in #1291. It makes for interesting viewing.

I heard that the English-language version of Al-Jazeera will be less partisan than the Arab-language version, but I suspect that it will only be a matter of degree. Also, why is the venerable Dave Maresh working there? That was a shocker.