Al Jazeera rocks!

I very rarely use an exclamation mark, that too in a title, feeling that it is the literary equivalent of being on crack cocaine. Al Jazeera's new English service feels just like crack cocaine, to readers used to the dull high of Western media's haze inducing ganja. Al Jazeera's first coup (one of several I'm sure) is to penetrate the hightly secretive regime of Myanmar, closed to Western journalists for decades. Al Jazeera got access by being famously impartial or perhaps slightly anti-Western.

In three in-depth, long and well written articles Al Jazeera covered the political, economic and humanitarian conditions on the ground in Myanmar. I for one was amazed to find that "United Nations statistics show that as many under-fives die each year in Myanmar as in Sudan. More Myanmar children are malnourished than in Somalia and Myanmar has more orphans than Afghanistan. Educationally, half of Myanmar's children fail to progress beyond primary level.
And yet Myanmar gets aid inflows that are 75 times less than Mozambique and 26 times lower than nearby Cambodia". I knew the situation in Myanmar was bad, but not this bad. A cursory glance at the map reveals a huge country, one that I had never noticed before. I felt shame at not knowing about a giant slice of Africa-style humanitarian disaster at in my very backyard. I also felt anger at Western news organisations for giving this country less coverage than Paris Hilton's nocturnal adventures. I have made Al Jazeera's English service my homepage over the last week, and have been rewarded with insightful stories and indepth editorials on the Middle East, South East Asia and even Sri Lanka. The insight it gives into the lives of the "others" is often a gut-wrenching look into the lives of politicians, militants, fundamentalists, journalists, women and chilren on the front lines of the crises of today.

On that note, I hate Al Jazeera's coverage of the Sri Lanka conflict, like all other news organisations their coverage starts with "The LTTE said", but as I have said before noone can be blamed if the GOSL is so woeful at getting its message out. When will they learn that "the military had no comment" is as good as an admission of guilt.

That being said, Al Jazeera should atleast be on an educated person's "to read" list for the day. Maybe even their homepage.