Former editor-in-chief of CBC News Tony Burman was interviewed recently by the ever-adroit Steve Paikin of TVO (who I doubt will ever go to a Qatar station to make his point, and his career) about his new position of managing editor for Al Jazeera English.
Burman is working on a possible new presence of Al Jazeera English on Canadian television. He appeared on the defensive during the whole interview, as though he was on an up hill battle to convince the Canadian public, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, to include this channel on their viewing list. His anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Canadian stance is evident in these quotes I have provided from the interview.
But, what else would one expect from a former CBC employee?
Here are the quotes:
I have to add that Burman's speaking style is mediocre and his words are at times undecipherable (just compare him to Paiken). And this is someone who spent the past 35 years or so as a leader in a national television and radio broadcasting service.Anything [i.e. the Al Jazeera network] that is detested so much by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney must have some redeeming merit to it.
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Our feeling is that we serve a wider interest than simply fawning after what the U.S. government does.
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We bring to the table a far more global, less parochial, less Western perspective.
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It was only after 9/11, when Al Jazeera had the temerity to actually report, that contrary to what was being claimed by the Americans, that civilians were being killed in Afghanistan, that Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney turned on it.
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That whole myth of an inappropriate relationship between Al Qaeda and Al Jazeera is nonsense.
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[Al Jazeera English’s] lens is very much of the perspective of the developing world. It tries to bring to the stage the voiceless, the peripheral part of the world, dare I say the majority of humanity, who often get ignored and marginalized by the centers of power.
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What it means…to a Canadian, or to an American, is that you have a far more comprehensive, a far more balanced view of the issues in front of us.
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It’s not biased, it is not ideological, but what it is is it is a greater reflection of the totality of this planet than you get in a narrow Western-centric, American-centric coverage that most of has have had in front of us for years.
