The Arab news agency Al-Jazeera is described by the Bush administration as a "mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden." Middle East leaders allege it’s a conduit for American propaganda. If that’s true and this film is a fair representation of how much of the Arab world views the US, our foreign policy is deeper in the tank that we thought. Director Noujaim says that if they are "…pissing everyone off—American and Arabs—they must be doing something right."

"Control Room" takes us through the early stages of the current Gulf War, from the viewpoint of what Muslims see on TV. Some interesting observations are that when the former Iraqi dictator is discussed, there is not one word of positive support. To our surprise, there is considerable admiration for the U.S. Constitution and American values. The people viewing this station seem to be getting a more balanced perspective than that seen by most Americans in the US. Often multiple points of view on a subject are presented (e.g., both Arab and American injured and dead), but more importantly, they clearly understand our culture while our media tends to paint a high percentage of Arabs that don’t live in the US with the fundamentalist radicalism of bin Laden. While Al-Jazeera may indeed be food for propaganda of the Muslim radicals, it also shows that apparently millions of Muslims may think certain actions by Americans are ill advised at best, demonic at worse, but that the US is not a nation of evil doers. And while Americans see the actions in Iraq as very separate from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arabs tend to view them in the same context.

Al-Jazeera made a point of telling the US where its reporters were with precise coordinates. One of the more moving scenes in the film was a reporter killed shortly after we see him sitting on a rooftop when planes come in to make a precision bombing strike. One questions what was the purpose of striking that target.

American press officer Lt. Josh Rushing admits that he found himself less troubled by images of wounded Iraqis than he was by pictures of injured Americans. "It makes me hate war," says Rushing, who compares Fox News to Al-Jazeera. It proves that we may not know ourselves to the extent we think we do.

The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein appears to be a staged event, unlike what was shown on American TV and in the print media. Does this mean that the "liberal" media can be trumped by patriotism or are the reporters more concerned about having access to future events if they provide coverage of key events that the government wants portrayed in a certain way?