Control Room(2004)
dir. Jehane Noujaim
The Iraq war told from two newsrooms.
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Noujaim spent the weeks of the 2003 Iraq invasion inside Al Jazeera's newsroom in Doha, Qatar, and in the US military's media center nearby. We meet an Al Jazeera producer, a veteran editor and a Marine press officer, and all of them are trying to tell the same war to different audiences.
Why it’s here
The film is a lesson in how the same event becomes two stories. What's punk is the way it takes the network Americans were told to distrust and lets us see how it works. What's pedagogical is that it gives students a frame for asking who is telling this and why. Pairs with Manufacturing Consent and This Is Not Propaganda. Note: made in 2004, so it's a time capsule; the Marine press officer, Josh Rushing, later joined Al Jazeera, which the film doesn't show.
Where This Film Lives
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