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Politics

Tony Bruman from Al Jazeera, begs the question: USA censorship on a big scale?

Al Jazeera is available in Canada now, thanks to a grassroots effort to make it so.

You don’t need to love the program, or even watch it, to feel that some form of wide scale, highly visible and excepted censorship is going on in the USA when a big legitimate news service is denied access to most cable services across the States. Are you OK with that?

Or do you want Al Jazeera to be a news option available to you on your cable programing? If it isn’t, why isn’t it? Is US media self-censoring/censored? Are we free to think for ourselves or is there a self-selected group that control what and how news reaches us?

The Huffingtong Post covers the question in this article: Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S. – which include these links to take action if you want to see Al Jazeera available to all Americans, not just Canadians, South Americans and some people in Washington D.C. (ironic, huh?), Vermont and Ohio:

  • http://www.iwantaje.net/
  • http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/Customers/contactus/ContactUs.html
  • http://www.timewarner.com/corp/contacts_support.html
  • http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/contact_us

A good article by AlterNet: Will Al Jazeera English Revolutionize America’s TV News Landscape? – covers the same ground in more depth.

From the article:

According to the Pew Research Center’s annual State of the News Media report, coverage of international events by American media fell by about 40 percent in 2008. Thus has a bizarre situation arisen: at the most interconnected time in history, accurate and comprehensive news of the outside world is disappearing — and with it an informed public.

The news service is available online: Al Jazeera streaming live online