I like Juan Cole a lot in general, but not this piece. Here Juan is using smear tactics here to dismiss a perfectly reasonable piece by journalist Emad Mekay. It's completely fair game to talk about who the U.S. is funding in Egypt, particularly in the wake of a military coup backed by people to whom the U.S. gave "pro-democracy" funding. There was a very similar story in Venezuela in 2002: people looked at U.S. funding of groups that backed the coup, in fact the State Department Inspector General did a report on it, finding that the U.S. had indeed given "pro-democracy" funding to groups which backed the coup in Venezuela.
There are legitimate questions about Al Jazeera's politics in general (as with so many other news sources.) That doesn't mean that this particular piece can be dismissed because it appeared on Al Jazeera. It should also be pointed out that Al Jazeera is being put under pressure right now for being sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood - which, in general, is a fair enough criticism of a news organization - but the current context of this criticism is that media in Egypt sympathetic to the Brotherhood are being shut down, whereas media sympathetic to the coup operate freely. There was a recent incident in which Al Jazeera was booed out of a press conference being held by the coup regime in Egypt by the other journalists - that is, by the pro-coup "journalists." The author of the Al Jazeera piece is Emad McKay. As the Al Jazeera piece notes at the end: "Emad Mekay is a journalist with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, which conducted this investigation" Here's Mekay's bio at Inter Press Service: Emad Mekay Global Trade and Finance Correspondent Emad Mekay is the IPS trade and finance correspondent, based in Washington, D.C. He joined IPS in October 2001, and has since broken several stories related to controversial activities of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He has also reported widely on the activities of the anti-globalisation movement, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world. He was a winner of the 2003 Project Censored Award from California’s Sonoma State University for his 2002 story on the ‘shady’ dealings of shamed multinationals Enron and Worldcom in the developing world. http://www.ips.org/institutional/our-global-structure/biographies/emad-mekay/ The fact that the U.S. gave "pro-democracy" funding to groups that backed the coup in Egypt doesn't mean that the U.S. authored the coup or caused the coup, as Juan Cole rightly says, but Mekay never said it did. The U.S. was trying to maintain good relations with different actors, not surprisingly - that's what one would expect, that's what Russia does, Iran does, etc. Nonetheless, pointing out who the U.S. was funding is completely fair game, particularly given that the U.S. was funding people who not only backed the coup afterwards, but called for it before; and particularly given that some of the funding may have violated U.S. law. On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Chuck Grimes <[email protected]> wrote: > Aljazeera Arabic has long since lost a lot of its previous journalisic > standards, once its head, Waddah Khanfar, was fired in favor a member of > the > royal family. Some 22 Egyptian journalists just resigned from Aljazeera in > Cairo in protest against its Fox-News-like biases in reporting on recent > events. > > Aljazeera English usually still does a good job, having a different > editorial line and generally good reporters, often former BBC or ABC > reporters. > > But their publication of a frankly brain dead op-ed feature article > purporting to show US support for anti-Morsi political forces is sheer > conspiracy theory and very bad, unbalanced journalism. > > http://www.juancole.com/2013/07/aljazeeras-conspiracy-brainless.html > > Slowly over the last year or so AJE got less and less edgey and more and > more fluff, and I stopped watching it in a compulsive way, and reverted to > just checking up on this or that. > > So the explains it and why AJE reporting on June 30 was nearly void of > coherent content. > > Doug had a good interview with Gilbert Achcar that helped with a view on > June 30 and current events worth listening to. > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected]
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