Bland coverage and untapped resources

Although it has dramatically decreased in popularity, for some Americans, the six o'clock evening news is still a ritual event that gathers busy families around the TV.

The comforting voices of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather were there for us every evening, through good times and bad, to consolidate information from around the world and present it to millions of Americans in a neatly packaged half-hour of programming.

Yet the more I watch the evening news, the more exasperated I become with the content and the format concerning major events, most notably the war in Iraq.

More often than not, it's the same footage of boring characters repeating the same stories every night. Bland broadcasts make it hard to care about the issues that appear every evening on our TVs. Exploring alternative news coverage of these issues, however, is important to expanding our own ability to understand them knowledgably.

The redundancy in American networks' evening coverage of the war in Iraq is mind numbing. In typical broadcasts, the president or someone from his posse comments on the supposed progress America has made, followed by a segment with gruesome footage about a car bomb in Baghdad.

These dull broadcasts do little to engage the viewer in discussing the war. Instead, they make people want to change the channel in passive frustration and watch the latest in convoluted episode of reality TV.

Adequate and balanced coverage is severely lacking.

Typically, the people who get the airtime and are quoted most often about the war have rarely been in Iraq or experienced the effects of the war on the ground. Even more perplexing is that native Iraqis are rarely seen on American news channels commenting about developments in their own country. It always seems to be an American diplomat, military general or political appointee.

These high-ranking individuals tend to discuss what their plans are for Iraq and what they expect to see, but rarely are there interviews with people from the ground who can comment firsthand about the effects of big plans and developments.

Yet there exists a wealth of untapped English-language news sources that feature engaging interviews with a variety of politicians, military figures and ordinary citizens to bring the issues on the ground closer to home.

Unfortunately, high-ranking American politicians have warned against such sources, most notably Al-Jazeera based in Qatar.

The network has weathered verbal beatings from virtually all the biggest names in American politics, most notoriously Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who called the network's coverage in Iraq "outrageous" and "inexcusably biased."

Interestingly, this harsh criticism came amid American military bombing of the network's offices in Baghdad and Kabul. Contrary to implications from big names like Rumsfeld, networks like Al-Jazeera do not function as mouthpieces for ominous terrorist organizations.

Internationally-based networks display a wide range of topics and perspectives in their work.

Al-Jazeera's English Web site features interviews with a mixture of figures knowledgeable about a wide variety of U.S. news, global news, world economy and social issues. With an English news channel in the works, Americans can expect to see a lot more of Al-Jazeera in the near future.

As students, a wealth of sources is available to us, and finding reliable freelance, independent and international news takes seconds.

If the UW campus is any indication, college students spend a lot more time parked in front of computers rather than TVs. Before you close your e-mail, bookmark a few Web sites and skim some stories when you have a few minutes.

It sure beats another bland evening news broadcast.

Reach Daily columnist Hanady Kader at [url='mailto:hanadykader@thedaily.washington.edu']hanadykader@thedaily.washington.edu[/url]