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7.27.2004 posted by William 22:00 link |
I read Al Jazeera sometimes, and today I wanted to look at a feature they had on the Rafa refugee camp, so I brought it up in Safari. Unforunately, Al Jazeera's site is all about Microsoft shit, so the links inside the special feature didn't work. I opened up Firefox to see if open source could do better and typed in aljazeera.com. What came up was a news page, but it didn't look like the one I had open in Safari. The color scheme, logo, layout, and headlines were different. What I had bookmarked in Safari was aljazeera.net.
So both sites look genuine and call themselves Al Jazeera, but if they're so different, which one is official? I went to the Wikipedia, which is on its way to becoming a good general purpose encyclopedia these days, but is already amazing at certain subjects, especially anything internet-related. The entry for Al Jazeera has a links section with an interesting note: "Note that the website aljazeera.com is not at all affiliated with Al Jazeera and some would say that the aljazeera.com website does feature all the hallmarks of an -- albeit sophisticated -- copycat, cybersquatting and/or disinformation site." The banner ad across the top of the page is for "Secret Swiss Offshore Banking" and links to a site that is sketchily rendered into English or maybe it's just the site is really sketchy, itself. Below the webpage equivalent of the fold, where most news sites put sports and Metro and such, there is a section entitled Conspiracy Theories. But what really catches my eye is the headline Vanunu: Israel behind Kennedys assassination, which is under Middle East News -- not Conspiracy Theories. Vanunu is described as a "Freed Israeli nuclear spy." The article appears with a photo of JFK with the caption "Israel was behind the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy". The comments run the gamut from doubtful to anti-Semitic to bitching about the relevancy of who killed Kennedy versus who (really) killed Malcolm X. I'd like to know who's running aljazeera.com. |