Has al-Jazeera been unjustly singled out by the Bush administration for broadcasting images of the P.O.W.s and dead soliders when other media outlets — including Western news stations — also aired the images?

Mohammed el-Nawawy

Mohammed el-Nawawy’s Response: There is no doubt in my mind that al-Jazeera has been treated unfairly here for showing images of P.O.W.s for several reasons:

Many American networks, including CBS, showed still pictures from the footage that was broadcast on al-Jazeera. It was a dramatic demonstration of how U.S. officials found themselves outpaced by reports and images from the battlefield. Al-Jazeera, by showing these images, did put pressure on U.S. administration to admit the capturing of these P.O.W.s.

Many American media showed faces of Iraqi P.O.W.s and Iraqi casualties, so asking al-Jazeera to refrain from airing footage of American P.O.W.s was considered to be a double standard.

CNN aired images of American soldiers dragged on the streets of the Somali capital Mogadishu in 1993, but it was not blamed the way al-Jazeera was.

Al-Jazeera is not watched by American families, and so the concern that American families might have known about the fact that their sons were captured by watching the media did not apply to al-Jazeera. Despite that, al-Jazeera did not air the footage of American P.O.W.s in full after airing it the first time.

For al-Jazeera, airing these images was not a matter of taste, but it was an obligation to inform its audiences about an essential part of the war.

Marda Dunsky

Marda Dunsky’s Response: The issue is not so much al-Jazeera’s airing of images that American audiences would find disturbing, whether or not those images are also broadcast by Western/U.S. media outlets. What the Bush administration and the American public need to understand is that al-Jazeera makes its editorial decisions based on the interests and sensitivities of its audience, which is found throughout the Arab world — not according to the whims of the American government or what the average American viewer would find acceptable or offensive.

The Bush administration — as American administrations past and to come — favors democratizing trends in the Arab world. This includes free media. Naturally no matter what the audience, media freedom should be exercised responsibly. But as American and Arab commentators have pointed out, al-Jazeera is operating at least in part on market principles, which dictate that content follows audience interest. Critics of al-Jazeera’s coverage argue that the network is deliberately whipping up anti-American and anti-Israeli furor in the Arab world. But its coverage should be seen as the messenger. The message, or cause of that anger, is frequently said to be American foreign policy in the region — not how media, Arab or Western, cover its results.

Joan Konner

Joan Konner’s Response: Al-Jazeera is not alone. The administration, and, for that matter, all administrations, try to control the press and even to censor it. At best, we call those efforts “spin.” At worst, we call them lies. The Bush administration has criticized most mainstream news organizations plus the BBC. It isn’t good politics to criticize the news media publicly, either domestic or that of our allies, but administrations do it in phone calls of complaint to news reporters and executives. When complaints don’t work, administrations withhold access to sources. Just ask the publishers, editors, and reporters who have suffered such calls and reprisals.