Video Review Control Room - Essay Example

It clearly narrates the motives behind that information gathering and the way the reporters of the news agency strived to present it. The documentary also presents the motives that the US army had created behind the attack that they planned on Iraq. CHANGE OF PERCEPTION ON THE WAR ON IRAQ. The documentary highlighted quite a few points that I, as general public was unaware of earlier. It may also have owed to the propaganda by the US dominated news agencies that the side of the story narrated by the video under discussion was earlier not known to the masses.

The only way a person from the general public would look at the war was just what was imposed upon them by the American Media. The video shows that the American media created a hype before the invasion. The military used its nation’s media to tell the general public that Saddam Hussain was a threatening figure. The video narrated that revenge was induced in the American public by increasing the level of danger sometimes from yellow to Orange and then to danger level. These terminologies convinced the general public of the USA that what their president was authorizing was just the very right thing to be done at the moment.

Thus, the overall scene before the initiation of war was that the American public got threatened from the existence of Saddam Hussain. He was portrayed as being capable of possessing and operating weapons of mass destruction that was a threat to the United States of America and to the entire world on the whole. It was even propagated that Saddam could give those weapons of mass destruction to Osama bin Laden or to anyone else. Instead of letting the American public realize what war actually meant and what was the exact meaning of attacking a Sovereign nation the propaganda overshadowed their realization.

This video, on the other hand told the other side of the story. It told clearly that the Americans formulated information in a manner that it would go in their favor. As quoted by an Al-Jazeera spokesman, “We want to show that every war has a human cost. We are Arabs like them. We are Muslims like them we are with the common Iraqi man. We care for them.” (Control room, 2008) The point of view about the Iraq-US war has changed in the perspective that thousands of innocent people including women and children both.

Thousands of people lost their homes. Numerous innocent of civilian families died. All this was done at the cost of enforcing democracy and that too, for the public that was being devoid of their very basic right of shelter and food. STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE VIDEO. The weaknesses of the video are the weaknesses of the organization itself. The organization was an Arab based organization Owing to that they had an emotional attachment with the Iraqi nation as a whole. Though not biased in favor of the Saddam regime the reporters and other team members of Al-Jazeera had their hearts connected to the civilian public that were under the American oppression.

Thus they can be termed as being biased in favor of the Iraqi common man. As quoted in the earlier part of the document a spokesman of the Al-Jazeera network quoted that since he was born in Iraqi and grew up in Iraq he had his heart with the Iraqis and recognized well what they talked like and how they felt. In line of the American military and government however, the weaknesses of the organization were that they weren’