Sunday, May 16, 2004

People in US (especially the ones who do not know Arabic but insist on evaluating AlJazeera) do not know the extent to which AlJazeera goes out of its way to cover every utterance by every US official, LIVE. I, in fact, told the Chairperson of the Board of AlJazeera in Qatar in February that they are overdoing it to please the US administration, even when the coverage is not newsworthy. Another criticism of AlJazeera: since I started watching it, I certainly noticed that one of their correspondents, Taysir `Alluni (who was their correspondent in Afghanistan during the Taliban) was quite sympathetic to Bin Laden and Taliban. He was the most biased correspondent that I have seen on the air. Worse, he once lied on the air: he denied having interviewed Bin Laden, and it later turned out that he in fact had interviewed him more than once. He is now under investigation by the Spanish government for links to Al-Qa`idah. I think that AlJazeera should put him on a paid leave pending the end of his trial. Yet, he is still appearing on the air.