Americans View Al Jazeera English Web | Cable Blocks In US

AOC has sourced articles out of Al Jazeera from our inception. We like Al Jazeera very much and find it to be far more even-handed in reporting issues than say FOX News. We have never found a major discrepancy between Al Jazeera and the BBC News, for example.

Often we go to Al Jazeera to check for reporting that runs counter to what we’re reading in the Western press. Not being big TV watchers, we were surprised to learn just now that Canadian viewers can turn on Al Jazeera English cable TV but most Americans cannot.

For all practical purposes, Al Jazeera is blocked from broadcasting in America.

The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has been a surge in traffic to the media outlet’s website, where footage can be seen streaming live. The last 24 hours have seen a two-and-a-half thousand percent increase in web traffic, Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English, told HuffPost. Sixty percent of that traffic, he said, has come from the United States. via Huff Po

A few days ago, Anne proposed that the fact that only 28% of biology teachers teach evolution as mandated by numerous court cases is that they fear reprisals from a few parents. Our children are not educated in science fully endorsed by the Vatican but opposed by fundamentalist Christians who say Genesis is true and should be the law of the land.

The minority rules although some of our Conservative friends — many of whom accept intelligent design — have pointed out that the teachers should be help accountable for not teaching what both their curriculums and the Supreme Court mandate.

This was the concensus on Anne private Facebook page, with our Conservative friends saying the Christian fundamentalists don’t speak for them.

It seems that a similar problem exists with Al Jazeera’s English broadcast.

Tony Burman says that even though the climate to present to cable operators is more favorable now than under the Bush Administration, cable companies are very worried that they will lose more subscribers by offering Al Jezeera than by withholding the network.

In Canada, national regulators can require cable companies to provide certain channels and Al Jazeera ran a successful campaign to encourage Canadians to push the government to intervene. There has been extremely little negative reaction over the past year as Canadians have been able to view the channel and decide for themselves. “We had a completely different process and result here in Canada — a grassroots campaign that was overwhelmingly successful,” said Avi Lewis, the former host of Al Jazeera’s Frontline USA. (He now freelances for Al Jazeera while working on a documentary project with his wife, Naomi Klein.) via Huff Po

Yesterday CNN’s Fareed Zakaria had a representative from Al Jazeera on his must-watch Sunday TV GPS show. It is beyond nonsense that Al Jazeera can’t be viewed in America. Instead, it’s one more example of how we Americans put our head in the sands, not really wanting or caring what’s going on in the world.

Given the events in the Middle East, every American’s future could well be impacted changes that are rippling throughout the region. At Anne of Carversville, we want to know the Arab perspective and embrace Al Jazeera as a reputable news source.