A lucid look at Al-Jazeera

Noujaim, a Cairo-born, US-based director who made the scrappy 2001 Internet documentary "Startup.com," takes her camera into the offices of Al Jazeera, where she finds seasoned journalists proud of working for the only news organization in the Arab world that isn't a state puppet. At the same time, these men and women are wrestling with the question of whether journalistic objectivity can be maintained -- or even should be maintained -- in the face of a US media they see as obsessed with delivering only the good news to the folks back home.

Their arguments are articulate, impassioned, all over the map, and hammered out in the heat of the moment; Noujaim captures a remarkable scene of senior producer Samir Khader berating a staff member for lining up an American activist who claims the war is just a grab for Iraq's oil. The guy was trashing his own country, the staffer says in defense, but Khader responds, as if explaining the moon to a child, "We want guests who are balanced."

Khader is a smart and charismatic figure in "Control Room," one who with quiet defiance backs his network's footage of Iraqi casualties as supplying evidence of war's human cost that Americans don't want to know about. (On Al Jazeera's images of a wounded, crying child, he bristles, saying: "I'm supposed to call this incitement? I call this true journalism, the only true journalism in the world.") Khader can dismiss the flag-waving Iraqi mob that accompanied the US entry into Baghdad as a staged event and, in the next breath, admit he'd willingly work for Fox News and "exchange the Arab nightmare for the American dream." It sounds like hypocrisy; it plays as realpolitik candor.