Eric Calderwood has written a fascinating piece on Al Jezeera in the Boston Globe that is worth a read. But I have some quibbles. Here's the first:

It is openly partisan, almost never showing Israeli deaths or injuries.

Maybe they don't show Israeli injuries or deaths because the ratio was so out of proportion? Or maybe because Al Jezeera doesn't have a presence on the ground inside Israel?

But he's spot on about this:

in a larger sense, Al-Jazeera's graphic response to CNN-style "bloodless war journalism" is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera's brand of news - you could call it "blood journalism" - takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.

And more:

As Americans, we're used to hearing the sound of heavy artillery, machine guns, and bombs in action films and video games. Yet here on the news, they seem strangely out of place. You could argue that Al-Jazeera uses images of civilian violence to foment public outrage against Israel. This might well be true. At the same time, these images acknowledge human suffering and civilian death and stand strongly against them - and in doing so, foment outrage against war itself.

But I entirely disagree with this premise of Calderwood's:

This is news without even the pretense of impartiality.

Actually, it's what I would call real news. If, in America, we saw more images of dead American slodiers and their Iraqi victims, dead American soldiers in Afghanistan and their innocent victims we might reconsider what it is we are doing over there. Hell, at The Agonist we've gotten flack from our own readers for posting fairly graphic images. I personally think more should be posted. We should all see the reality of war. And to be honest, I'm not sure why I've back down on this policy here. But back to another quibble with Calderwood's:

Each day, viewers here in Syria and across the Arab world tune into a new "episode."

Wrong. Each day viewers see reality, not the faux reality so common in the West. And besides, war isn't American Idol.

Indeed Calderwood admits as much in the rest of the graf:

Each day, the war's narrative builds and folds back on itself, reinforcing the audience's familiarity with the cast of characters: Hamas, the scrappy rebel; Israel, the regional bully; the civilians of Gaza - and, in particular, the wounded children - caught in the middle of the conflict. The "international community" is a bloviating model of inefficacy, tied up in innumerable committees and summits. Through it all stride the Al-Jazeera correspondents, decked out in blue bulletproof vests.

You don't see Anderson Cooper striding through war zones? How many big name CNN correspondents have died in Afghanistan or Iraq?

And this graf I just don't get:

The staged suspense, the protestations of surprise - they smack of cynical theater. But it's hard to argue with the footage itself: There have been several independent reports of Israeli attacks and raids during the daily cease-fire. However they choose to frame it, Al-Jazeera correspondents are capturing events that other networks cannot. At that basic level, what they're doing is irreplaceable as journalism.

If it's irreplaceable journalism, how is it staged suspense? It's a war. The realm of chance, as Clausewitz said.

I think the real issue Calderwood is grappling with, but doesn't really know it, or at least he's unwilling to admit it to himself, yet, is that he is seeing reality as it is, not as the spin-meisters and court jesters at CNN or Faux News would have.

Take this graf for example:

I can understand why many people strongly believe that Al-Jazeera itself contributes to these regional hatreds. But after months of watching the network intensely, I can honestly say that I've never heard their newscasters frame an argument or a story in anti-Semitic or anti-American terms.

He can understand, but he's just shown that for all the criticism leveled at Al Jezeera (and it does deserve some) it's not the network most Westerners, or at least Americans think it is. Not remotely. And he's caught in a cultural bind. He clearly perceives the superiority of Al Jezeera versus the garbage we get in the West, but he can't quite bring himself to embrace it.

Again, do you ever see anything like this on CNN, MSNBC or Faux News, much less the big national nightlies:

And Al-Jazeera hosts one of the most ecumenical news programs I have ever seen on TV, anywhere: A morning spot called the "Press Tour," which shows images of newspapers from the United States, Europe, the Arab world, and (notably) Israel, and translates excerpts of the most important articles.

So, why can't Calderwood embrace it?

Well, I can only speak for myself, as I watch Al Jezeera frequently now too. We want to believe that our way, our tribe, does it better than that of another. But in this case, it just isn't true. And that's a hard reality to swallow and admit, especially on the pages of the Boston Globe. No one wants to be saddled with the label, "well, he's gone native on us now."