Susan Granger’s review of “Control Room” (Magnolia Pictures)
For those who speak Arabic, Al Jazeera is the world’s leading news service and a frequent source of controversy in the Western world. The popular satellite channel reaches an audience of 40 million in the Middle East, and its importance is constantly growing. Focusing on Al Jazeera’s coverage of beginning of the war in Iraq, Egyptian-American, Harvard-educated filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (“Startup.com”) examines the entire concept of objectivity in news reporting. To that end, this documentary focuses on various journalists, putting a human face on the network that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled “Osama bin Laden’s mouthpiece.” Shot over a six-week period, beginning in March, 2003, at Al-Jazeera’s studios in Doha, Qatar, and at the U.S. military’s Central Command press office, located just a few miles away, it shows a frustrated staff emotionally opposed to the war but struggling to present an objective view. There’s sardonic senior producer Samir Khader, a Jordanian who is critical of the Bush administration but insists Al-Jazeera doesn’t want to alienate Americans. “You cannot wage a war without…propaganda,” he asserts as the film begins. Later on, he confesses he’d take a job with the Fox News Channel, trading “the Arab nightmare for the American dream.” Sudanese Hassan Ibrahim grew up in Saudi Arabia, where he was a classmate of bin Laden, went to school in Arizona and spent a year following the Grateful Dead. He’s an Arab nationalist who strongly opposes the war. And Lt. Josh Rushing is a likable Centcom press officer who’s unfailingly honest. In Arabic with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Control Room” is a probing, provocative 9. It’s a vivid, new perspective on the question: “What is truth?”
