Mastodawn

Too many people act like Al Jazeera has some sort of anti-American bias, but the truth is that the way that paper has reported the war of the US and Israel with Iran shows the deep entanglements of Qatar, the country that funds Al Jazeera, with the US. Like many countries in the region, Qatar has long hosted a US military base, which was obviously going to be a target for Iran after the US and Israel launched a brutal and unprovoked attack on Iran in the middle of negotiations.

And what does Al Jazeera do? It parrots the US narrative of Iran as being a dangerous aggressor in the region, as if it was supposed to just sit there and wait for the US to launch more attacks from those bases. When according to that same article, the attacks by Iran resulted in only 28 deaths, not in Qatar, but in the entire region. Clearly these were surgical strikes meant in a defensive capacity to take out US military bases in the region while minimizing casualties. The same can't be said for either the US or Israel, who immediately attacked schoolchildren in Iran. As of Mar 1, at least 3,468 people had been massacred in Iran by attacks from the US and Israel.

All of this kind of behavior is of course even worse in mainstream US-based news like The New York Times, CNN, or CBS, which promote US exceptionalism and imperialist propaganda.

And my point is not to avoid biased news--that's impossible. My point is to expand the news sources being read, not just within one's own country, but internationally, and to make an effort to understand which sources are truly independent from each other. Because bias isn't just a matter of how true a story is, but also a matter of what stories get told and how a news outlet chooses to tell them.

Regarding Al Jazeera, it should be understood that it is currently more aligned with the US than with its victims. To get a perspective from the region that's not US aligned, one option is Al Mayadeen.