So why has Al Jazeera English found it so difficult to gain a foothold in the United States? One reason is a perceived lack of audience; the network is not typical American television fare, and cable operators doubt many Americans would embrace the change. During the two years I worked at Al Jazeera English, I was continually amazed by the channel's inversion of conventional U.S. news values--in particular, its willingness to convey suffering in the developing world, like that of the Samouni family, in graphic detail. Far from conspiracy or manipulation, as critics charge, this use of evocative imagery is the natural result of a dynamic process meant to translate news into what Bruce Shapiro, director of the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma, calls "the visual language of a particular culture."

"It's not about a rigid corporate agenda or a rigid imperialist agenda imposed from above," Shapiro explains in an interview with the author. "It's about a much more complex dynamic between sources, journalists, managers, and image-makers."

Unpacking that dynamic is essential to understanding the biases of American news, as well as the difficulties channels like Al Jazeera English have attracting an audience in the United States. Understanding this also gives reason to hope that given a broader range of media options, the media preferences of Americans--and popular sympathies--might change as well.

Preference for Sanitization, or Is it Hypocrisy?

It is well documented that when it comes to war and tragedy abroad, the American media's tendency is to sanitize violence, showing none of the outrage and carnage evident in media accounts outside the United States. During the invasion of Iraq, Philip Kennicott in a 2003 article in the Washington Post attributed this reluctance to a mixture of "taste, ethics, professional standards and responsibility to a complex web of constituents." Yet the outcome of this equation is not always consistent.

"They're hypocrites," Marwan Kraidy, associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says of the U.S. media in an interview with the author. "They'll say 'we are not going to show mutilated bodies.' They all showed Ceauşescu's body in Romania. Everyone showed the bodies of the two sons of Saddam Hussein when they got killed. It's an indirect way to say we are more civilized but that is not the case." The culling of images, he adds, "is used selectively depending what the prevailing mood is."

The shooting of Iranian protestor Neda Agha-Soltan is a more recent example. In its rush to show the video, CNN did not at first blur her face. The result was one of the most iconic images of the year, recalling photos from the 1970 Kent State shootings or 1968 Vietnam's My Lai massacre with the power to shock viewers and galvanize public opinion against an old American foe.