Control Room

Control Room, by award-winning Arab-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com), provides an opportunity to re-examine a most pressing question of international relations still today: “is America radicalizing or stabilizing the Arab world?” Without miring itself in shadowing conspiracy theories, Control Room aims to provide a balanced view of Al Jazeera’s presentation of the second Iraq war to their global audience, and in doing so calls in to question many of the prevailing images and positions offered up by the U.S. news media.  Control Room provides a view inside Al Jazeera’s network branded ‘Osama Bin-Laden’s mouthpiece’, which was subject to intense criticism from U.S. administration officials for showing images of Iraqi casualties and American POWs that American viewers never saw, and in doing so calls into question many of the images and positions offered by the U.S. news media.  The film is both timeless and timely – timeless because it locates itself in the midst of the culture clash between Western and Arab worlds, and timely because it does so through the prism of satellite television news and the real world of war time foreign reporting.