A Bit More Detail

On my way home last night, I stopped off at The Empire (1018 Bloor Street West) for a quick bite to eat. The Empire is a serviceable restaurant, the fairly high quality of the food (Middle Eastern and East African) being undermined by the cafeteria atmosphere and the nominally present restroom facilities. What particularly interested me, as I ate my fish plate, was the broadcast of Al Jazeerah English that was being displayed on the large wall television.

Al Jazeerah has been controversial in Canada for a variety of reasons, including its perceived links to terrorism and anti-Semitism. I can't speak about that, not least because I didn't watch it for long enough, though the news ticker at the bottom did carry stories like the Netherlands' proposed ban of the burka and Cheney's refusal to withdraw from Iraq. The broadcast was professionally produced, the segments I watched featuring brief introductions by the station's various presenters around the world (onre, a British woman in east Java, talked about an environmental disaster) and rhetoric (by a reporter based in Doha) about the station's reversal of the North-to-South global information flow.

I don't have a television, yet, but I'm curious enough to want to look the station up when I do. It was definitely watchable.