Here's the Committee to Protect Journalists:

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned by reports that U.S. officials pressured Qatar in an attempt to influence the news coverage of the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite channel.

Following a meeting yesterday in Washington, D.C., with U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, Qatari ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani acknowledged that U.S. officials had asked him to use his influence to rein in Al-Jazeera's news coverage.

The U.S. government apparently feels that Al-Jazeera's programming has been unbalanced and anti-American, particularly in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Sharon Waxman in the Washington Post though took a refreshingly more candid approach:

But what kind of news is it? Al-Jazeera, for all its innovation, slick graphics and flashy logos, is not an Arab version of CNN. From watching the network for any length of time, it's clear that al-Jazeera takes a consistently hostile stance toward the United States. In al-Jazeera's world, the Taliban is invariably an underdog force, the United States looms as an occupying power, and Egypt and other moderate Arab states have knuckled under to the superpower's pressure. The channel's other central topic is Israel's persecution of Palestinians, a constant litany of suffering and aggression. Otherwise there is little on al-Jazeera except sports.

Any news organization is, in part, a product of its native culture. All American-based news networks, for example, make the unspoken assumption that the state of Israel has a right to exist and that Osama bin Laden is evil. In the Arab world, that looks like bias.

But critics of al-Jazeera, including many Arab journalists, say that even when such cultural disparities are taken into account, its credibility is hampered by slanted coverage and a tendency toward sensationalism. Those critics say al-Jazeera is tailoring its approach to suit the preconceptions of the Arab audience.

More typical of the coverage of al-Jazeera in America is shown in this review of "Control Room" in the Washington Post:

Noujaim's approach harks back to that of her mentors, the legendary documentary makers D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. Using lightweight video cameras, Noujaim's team gathered hundreds of hours of raw footage at CentCom headquarters and at the al-Jazeera offices in Doha. She followed three major characters: Samir Khader, a senior producer at al-Jazeera, his colleague Hassan Ibrahim and Marine Lt. (now Capt.) Josh Rushing, the CentCom press officer assigned to work with Arab media.

Khader emerges as the droll philosopher, a chain-smoking realist given to the existential insights one expects from a Parisian cafe denizen. Ibrahim, an English-born journalist of Sudanese descent who came to al-Jazeera from the BBC, is an amiable goad to his colleagues, and to Rushing, whom he manages to convince that, while perceptions may not be reality, they matter. And Rushing is an earnest foil, holding his ground when it comes to spelling out the American line but increasingly open to and conflicted about other perspectives.

Noujaim constructs her movie around several central episodes of the war: al-Jazeera's decision to show civilian casualties and the capture of American troops, the bombing by coalition forces of al-Jazeera's Baghdad office, which killed journalist Tariq Ayoub, and the fall of Baghdad, which profoundly demoralizes some of the al-Jazeera journalists.

Western journalists are presented as prey to distractions such as the Lynch rescue and mindless non-stories. When CentCom journalists are introduced to the famous deck of cards bearing pictures of top Iraqi leaders, there's desperation to get copies. But CentCom has none to offer, which leads to an apparently rare moment of confrontation between the reporters and the military.

"You kept hearing, 'This is a picture story,' " says Noujaim. "The cards were something that could be easily shown on television. All of the sudden their bosses were calling up. They don't want one station to get it before another. It felt crazy and absurd."

The choice of what to show, and what not to show, becomes the central issue facing both Western media and al-Jazeera. For Khader, the senior producer at al-Jazeera, his newsroom's focus on the humanitarian cost of the war was central to an Arab perspective that is, in journalistic terms, no less biased than an American perspective.

But this treatment of al-Jazeera is dishonest. It isn't simply another way of looking at things. It is poison. Keep in mind that the Palesitnian police already arrested someone for killing the schoolgirl last week. Yet even now this is how al Jazeera reports the killing:

Ten-year-old Nuran Iyad Dib went to school as ecstatic as any schoolgirl should be. But this crisp winter day was special: she would receive her bi-annual report card.

As it turned out, she passed with flying colours, which meant a gift from her parents, who had been saving up their dwindling funds for this occasion. The teacher's comment on top of her report read: We predict a very bright future for Nuran.

But Nuran would have no such future, and her gift lies abandoned in a corner of her family's grieving home. On the afternoon of 31 January 2005, Israeli sniper fire ripped through her face as she stood in her school's courtyard, lining up for afternoon assembly.

al Jazeera wants to be treated as "journalism." And many in the west apologize for it. But there's no excuse for this sort of incitement. (Backspin observed that Reuters noted that Israeli soldiers had no clear view into the schoolyard.) This is propaganda, not journalism. To apologize al Jazeera's excesses is to excuse them.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.