Osama bin Laden pondered the merits of US television news channels as he considered how to extract the best propaganda benefit from the tenth anniversary of 9/11 last year, and concluded that CBS was "close to being unbiased".
A US-born al-Qaida spokesman, Adam Gadahn, wrote back to Bin Laden laying the merits or otherwise of using US news stations to mark the "Manhattan battle" as it is referred to in the memo.
"In general, and no matter what material we send, I suggest that we should distribute it to more than one channel, so that there will be healthy competition between the channels in broadcasting the material, so that no other channel takes the lead.
It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News, let her die in her anger."
"As for the neutrality of CNN in English, it seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others (except Fox News of course)," he said.
Gadhan describes ABC as "all right":
"
I used to think that MSNBC channel may be good and neutral a bit, but is has lately fired two of the most famous journalists – Keith Olbermann and Octavia Nasser the Lebanese," wrote Gadahn.
(In fact, Nasser was sacked from CNN after she sent a tweet mourning the death of a Hezbollah leader.)
Stay Classy MSM
...sorry, I just watched The Anchorman the other night
ps...I didn't know that much about "VOA" but I can see why they were included on the terrorists short list...
Mullah Omar interview In late September 2001, VOA aired a report that contained brief excerpts of an interview with then Taliban leader Mullah Omar Mohammad, along with segments from President Bush's post-9/11 speech to Congress, an expert in Islam from Georgetown University, and comments by the foreign minister of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. State Department officials including Richard Armitage and others argued that the report amounted to giving terrorists a platform to express their views.
Abdul Malik Rigi interview On April 2, 2007, Abdul Malik Rigi, the leader of Jundullah, a militant group with possible links to al-Qaeda, appeared on Voice of America's Persian service. VOA introduced Rigi as "the leader of popular Iranian resistance movement".[60] The interview resulted in public condemnation by the Iranian-American community, as well as the Iranian government.[61][61][62][62][63] Jundullah is a Sunni Islamiist militant organization that has been linked to numerous attacks on civilians, such as the 2009 Zahedan explosion.[
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