More on al-Jazeera and Terrorists on the Internet

My lovely and devoted friend Mere had a comment/question: 

"I have never noticed there to be a public perception of al-Jazeera not being a high quality news source, or a general disregard for the fact that terrorists use Internet as a tool. You think this is the case?"

About al-Jazeera: In a word, yes. Allegations of various biases are rampant. First, let's rewind about 10 years. Al-Jazeera showed up on Western radars in a big way because it was the primary recipient of a series of videos featuring one Osama bin Laden. Al-Jazeera's decision to broadcast the videos (without harsh condemnation of the contents) led to accusations from US officials that the network was serving as a "mouthpiece for al-Qaeda" (thank you, Donald Rumsfeld). PBS Article During the Iraq War years, Al-Jazeera has also been criticized by the coalition governments for showing graphic images of the bodies of dead coalition troops and civilians, which supposedly incites anti-American sentiment. BBC article Basically, al-Jazeera caused the Bush administration to lose the news war in Iraq, and they were not happy about it. But you asked about public perception, not government perception. Well, Secretary Clinton certainly ignited a firestorm when she complimented al-Jazeera's coverage of the Arab Spring, calling it "real news," in March. HuffPo article I don't have any concrete numbers, but there must be thousands of op-eds out there lambasting her for her endorsement of an "anti-American" network (I clicked on a Yahoo!news article thinking it would be pretty middle-of-the-road...not so much). So it seems to me that, while changing somewhat, there are still a lot of folks out there who see al-Jazeera as Osama bin--er, Ayman al-Zawahiri's personal megaphone. I know this study isn't perfect, but I think it's an interesting read nonetheless. Basically, the study had three groups. One was not shown a video clip, while the other two were shown exactly the same clip, except one had CNN logos and the other had al-Jazeera English (AJE). All three groups answered the same questions about trustworthiness, likelihood to watch, etc. Without going into numerical details (those can be found at the link above) AJE "was evaluated significantly less favorably" than CNN across the board. Additionally,  participants who saw the video clip with CNN logos rated CNN more favorably than those who saw no clip, but AJE wasn't rated any higher by participants who saw the same clip.

The second part's going to have to wait until tomorrow. Ice cream calls. :-)