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CONNECTIONS
Many Questions surrounding ...
Al Jazeera America is
the most ambitious American television news venture since Rupert
Murdoch and Roger Ailes started the Fox News Channel in 1996. It faces
some of the same obstacles that Fox eventually glided over — including
blanket skepticism about whether distributors, advertisers and viewers
will give it a chance. But that is where the parallels to other
channels end, because Al Jazeera America is going against the grain of
seemingly every trend in television news.
“Viewers will see a
news channel unlike the others, as our programming proves Al Jazeera
America will air fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news,” said Ehab Al
Shihabi, the channel’s acting chief executive, on a news conference
call last week. He was explicit about what will be different, saying,
“There will be less opinion, less yelling and fewer celebrity
sightings.” [New
York Times - Al Jazeera America Promises a More Sober Look at the News]
Kennedy's
"pound
of flesh"(in 1988) was to illegally use his power to get even
with Rupert Murdoch for publishing a series on the 1969 Chappaquiddick
incident, and referring to him as "Fatso." Kennedy's maneuver
was
cloaked in the argument that it was not in America's interest to have
one man wielding so much media influence. If memory serves,
Murdoch
reached agreement to keep the Post by selling some television stations
he owned. What brings this to the forefront today is Al Gore's
sale of
his defunct Current cable
property to al Qaeda— I mean al Jazeera—the public outlet for al
Qaeda.
Excuse me, but would it be unfair to draw a
parallel to that and, say, if the NY Daily News was sold to
the
German
National Socialist Party in, say, August 1939? Before
Hitler had
formally declared war on the world, but not before everyone (with half
a brain) knew it was
coming? In this case, world Islam have formally declared it's
intentions against non-believers. War! And we give them this
platform?
Who are today's Ted Kennedy to raise the alarm, he said fatuously?
As
an aside, the sentence "One of the
many questions surrounding the Kennedy-Hollings midnight maneuver
... "jogged this connection from my "Defining Articles section [Democrats
subvert war intelligence]
It’s
one of the unsolved political mysteries of 2003: Exactly who drew up
the plan for Democrats to abuse the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, or SSCI, as a stealth weapon to undermine and discredit
President George W. Bush and the U.S. war effort in Iraq?
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