Sunday, March 26, 2006

It is amazing how hard AlArabiyya is trying to appease the US. And US officials are quite grateful; they seems to be happy, genuinely happy, to be on AlArabiyya as of late. AlArabiyya is doing the job, and I wish that they save us the money and end the Al-Hurra venture which is only being watched by its director and his friends. Also, do you notice that AlArabiyya interviewers--all of AlArabiyya interviewers--get really nervous when a guest criticizes Israel or US in strong language? They get really uncomfortable, and they always, ALWAYS, talk over the guest, or they say: "oh, we are running out of time." Also, on Aljazeera they really try to bring different points of views, but not on AlArabiyya. On Al-Arabiyya, they had a show on the Israeli elections, and they had Ahmad Tibi and an Arab member of...Kadima, as if the latter equally represents the Arab (inside Isarel) point of view. That is balance by Fox News' standards. This is like AshSharq Al-Awsat's idea of balance: they have scores of columnists, and then Fahmi Al-Huwaydi who seems to serve as the token critical-of-the-US perspective in many Saudi publications.