I have spent 12 hours every day since the start of the war watching al-Jazeera. (It's my job: I work for a 24-hour news channel.) In my claustrophobic, prefabricated newsroom, it has sometimes seemed as if I was watching two different wars - one on al-Jazeera, the other on the Western channels. When CNN was reporting that the deep-water port of Umm Qasr was secure, al-Jazeera was still covering the fighting.

LRB 17 April 2003 | PDF Download