Control Room

Year: 2004

Grade: B

Country: USA

Director: Noujaim

Review

documentary that takes us behind the scenes of al jazeera, the arab news station. the focus is primarily on the media coverage of the iraq war. we spend a lot of time with al jazeera corespondents and u.s. central command’s (centcom) media people, as well as other journalists from newspapers and tv networks around the world. “control room” doesn’t present a clean thesis like michael moore’s documentaries tend to do, but it give a valuable look into the process of creating news as many of the middlemen see it. that is, we see what briefings journalists get and how they decide to report it. as a result we also get an idea of the failings of such a system. it becomes fairly clear that reporters at centcom merely repeat the news they are given from the army personnel, rather than finding news through investigative means and reporting those findings. many of the journalists featured ask the military spokespeople serious and probing questions and get pretty standardized answers and plenty of spin control. if you know much of anything about how the mainstream media gets its “news” and what it repeats (er, reports) then much of this film will seem pretty pedestrian. that said, it’s still a valuable look into a new network that most americans don’t know anything about. at times the film comes off as bit of a commercial for al jazeera as producing the best journalism in the world, or as being the most objective. that said, some of the al jazeera employees recognize that their cannot be true objectivism and that all they can do is hope to provide a balanced representation of the war, as they see it. this, fog of war and fahrenheit 9/11 create the modern “progressive documentary holy trinity.” .

Watched in theater