Al Jazeera’s High Wire Act

“Al-Jazeera has been attacked by American officials as a propaganda tool for Osama bin Laden and other Muslim radicals. And as a journalist, I have often found its coverage unbalanced. It tries too hard to present the Arab news, rather than just the news,” David Ignatius writes in today’s Post. But when he visited Doha and talked to editor in chief Ahmed Sheikh, “I was struck… by how complicated it has become for al-Jazeera to cover this part of the world.”

Check out the examples of challenges in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Ignatius concludes: “After 10 years, al-Jazeera is confronting one of the abiding truths of honest journalism: that the world is damned complicated, and that it’s very hard to know who the good guys and bad guys are. That’s a start. If we can have common standards for covering the news in the Middle East, maybe we can eventually do something to fix the problems we all agree are there.”

> Howard Mortman says Al Jazeera confuses Ignatius…