Surprisingly, I really enjoyed the section of this film that we got to watch in class. I thought it was very eye opening to be able to see the news being portrayed by both sides of the fight. I thought it was incredible how both sides would do anything they could to put all of the blame on the other place. Obviously most of the damage in Al Jazeera was caused by US troops, but they put all of the blame on US which is not the true story.
Al Jazeeras news had a common theme with showing children and mothers "injured" from our troops. Whenever their newscasts would cut to commercials they would play the same 30 seconds of disturbing images that US troops had "caused". During the war US troops were armed in Al Jazeera and were only told to fire if we were fired at. Of course Al Jazeeras news wouldn't tell their civilians that fact because that would ruin their whole plan of looking like innocent victims.
This movie proved to us how biased the news can really be. At one point it was talking to a US troop who said he wasn't affected by the images of the dead Al Jazeeran people, but he was affected by the images of dead US troops. When I saw that part it clicked that people are more affected by things that relate to them more. People are people, no matter what side they're on, but we do feel more sympathy for those who have a closer link to us.
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