Palestinian Bilal Saleh was shot in the chest by an Israeli settler as he was harvesting his olive trees in al-Sawiya, occupied West Bank.

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    88
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    I disagree that it’s not a good source. Obviously, it has an Arab perspective but Al Jazeera English is one of the few TV news sources with journalists on the ground in Gaza (and Lebanon). I’ve found it to be more reliable than U.S. cable news, which has cut back on international reporting and so has been fairly worthless this whole conflict. To me, the quality of reporting on AJ English — not the pundits but the straight news segments — is as high as any other channel.

    Obviously, some media literacy and critical thinking is required and you should be aware that it’s a government-backed channel. When it switches to talk shows and more opinionated stuff, it’s very biased (as you’d expect). But they aren’t like RT or Fox News where even the ostensibly straight news bits are pure, uncut party propaganda.

    Also, no news source is free of bias. The NY Times is reliable and professional about reporting facts but it’s also going to cover topics of interest to upper class New Yorkers even when it’s silly. They cover student groups at fancy private colleges like they’re prominent NGOs staffed with experts and not a bunch of idiot kids who were born in like 2004 and haven’t been alive long enough to know shit from shinola. No matter where you get your news, you should always be aware of the incentives, target audience, and funding sources.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I disagree that it’s not a good source.

      It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the concern troll succeeded in derailing the conversation in this thread to be mostly about the merits of Al Jazeera and not about the actual topic of the article.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      For comparison, the Times of Israel, citing quite a bit of Haaretz (which is generally paywalled I’m not even going to try). By now the off-duty soldier has been arrested which is the actual news in this instance, presumably due to international eyes on the whole wider situation. Israel is generally speaking shit at extending the rule of law to Palestinians, and should Palestinian authorities try to touch an Israeli they get roflstomped.

      There’s left-wing Israeli orgs regularly organising trips into the West Bank to help Palestinians with the harvest specifically to avoid that kind of settler violence as should settlers kill an actual Israeli, even a left-wing one, they won’t get away wich cheap excuses, so they don’t even attempt to.

      Overall, right now, we seem to have a curious combination of fascists being emboldened while simultaneously Israel is trying its darnedest to not be seen as an Apartheid regime.