I finally watched Control Room this weekend. Honestly, I wasn’t so impressed. For me, at least, the differences in reporting between U.S. outlets and the non-U.S. outlets, especially Al Jazeera, are old news. There were a few surprising differences, but I’m unwilling to trust the movie any more than I would trust Fox News to fully describe themselves or, well, anything.

There were two particular items that got my attention. The first was that the military trotted out the story of Jessica Lynch on the same day that the troops were entering Baghdad. All the reporters they interviewed from the Al Jazeera folks to the CNN or NBC folks all complained about the fact that they were getting fed a feel-good smoke screen story while one of the biggest military episodes of this war was unfolding. The second item was the fact that the Baghdad offices of Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi TV, and the Palestine hotel (where many journalists were staying) were all hit on the same day by American troops. The key Al Jazeera folks in the movie all complained uniformly that they were targeted by our military in order to send them a message. I’m not sure what to believe here, to be honest, but I can see how some would reach the conclusion that the three buildings were deliberate targets. If that were true, it is reprehensible.

Final analysis, worth seeing in case you didn’t know about some of the issues. It’s not a can’t miss, but the movie serves as a good reminder that modern wars are as much media operations as they are military operations. The military tries hard to play the press. Thing is, our press doesn’t really try very hard to do their job. It’s just too expensive to cover a war these days, especially if you can be embedded as a VIP guest of the military…

(and yes, that means I’ve seen three movies this weekend… it’s a movie bonanza!)

Update: Via the message boards on IMDB, I find that our military bombed the Al Jazeera office in Kabul during the Afghan campaign.