France 24 and Al Jazeera
Posted on December 11, 2006 - Filed Under Media | 2 Comments
Hurrah for France 24 and Al Jazeera. Launched within a few weeks of each other, they’re both far better than all the other news channels available on Sky Digital, including Euronews, which I’ve had a lot of time for up until now (I’m not taking BBC World News into consideration here because you can’t get to it directly and instead have to access it through the ‘other channels’ feature, which is far too inconvenient).
Of course, it isn’t all that difficult to surpass the other news channels in terms of quality. Fox News is a disgrace, Sky News is just its British cousin, CNN International is bland beyond description, the Chinese propaganda/news channel, CCTV, is only marginally fairer than Fox, and the Indian news channel is way too focused on India. Euronews is good at what it does, and its ‘No Comment’ section is particularly good, but there’s a kind of ‘facelessness’ about the station that detracts from its overall appeal. Those Somfy ads that sponsor the weather are also incredibly annoying – please don’t buy anything from them.
As if to show how valuable these new channels are, today I was watching Kofi Annan’s speech in Missouri on Al Jazeera. I then was watching some discussion of it on France 24 when I wondered how the GOP fans over at Fox would be reacting to Annan’s criticism of recent US policy. Flicking to Fox, I was rather surprised to see that the topic under discussion was not Annan’s minutes-old speech but Paris Hilton and some other silly bitch setting a bad example for young girls, which, on reflection, shouldn’t have surprised me at all.
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2 Responses to “France 24 and Al Jazeera”
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damn, i wish i had cable – i like euronews for its blandness though,its nice to just get information, with the only biases being with the people they interview and the generally present both sides so…..
But euronews is way too pro-european. I mean, it IS euro news but at the same time if it slants one way on one thing it could just as easily do it on other topics, if you follow my meaning.
On the otherhand I wish i could speak like that guy.