Jehane Noujaim's first feature documentary was Startup.com with Chris Hegedus. She spoke to us about making Control Room and her experience of Al-Jazeera.

BBC Four: Did the fact that you're Egyptian-American have any bearing on you wanting to examine Al-Jazeera?
Jehane Noujaim: Definitely. I'd watched different news organisations covering the same event in the States and in Egypt, but often coming up with very different stories. I grew up in Egypt at a time when the news was very much state-controlled, and you didn't hear much government criticism, so when Al-Jazeera was launched in 1996 it was playing in every coffee shop in Cairo. I was excited to see that this channel had become so popular, didn't seem to have any kind of taboos, was really investigative and had debate shows about issues that nobody talked about in public. It shook things up in a way that I think was very good.

BBC Four: Considering that Al-Jazeera has been so demonised, how did it meet your expectations when you got there?
JN: It's funny, because when you hear it being called "Taleban TV", you somehow expect that Bin Laden tapes are floating in every day, but the journalists were just like any others, trying to do a job. The exciting thing about it was that it really felt like they were on some kind of mission. They see themselves as pioneers in media in the Arab world. In the film Samir talks about not being able to go to 15 of the 22 Arab countries, because he works for Al-Jazeera. It's not an easy move to make, to work for a channel that is disliked by so many Arab governments. He can't make the Hajj, the trip to Mecca, because Al-Jazeera is banned in Saudi Arabia. So I think that they really feel like they're sacrificing something, and the ethics of journalism are quite important to them.

BBC Four: It's interesting to see the American journalists mixing with the Al-Jazeera people off-camera. They are not at all like their gung-ho, ultra-patriotic TV image.
JN: You saw the pressure that they were under, too. Tom Mintier from CNN was questioning the Jessica Lynch story. He really didn't understand why they had released the video of her rescue the day that the troops went into Baghdad, when the video had been taken four days earlier. He was getting into all the specifics but his office said that the whole world wanted to know about Jessica Lynch so CNN couldn't be the only broadcaster questioning the story. He had to report it but that didn't mean that he didn't question it off-line.

BBC Four: Did you see any similarities between the American media and Al-Jazeera?
JN: There's a point in the film where Tareq Ayoub, who was later killed by US fire, is standing on a Baghdad rooftop and reporting that the city has been bombarded but people feel like they will make it through and their spirits haven't died. People have said to me, "This is very emotional, subjective reporting, don't you think?" But it very much reminded me of the reporters in New York during 11 September. I don't think anybody would have dared question interviews with victims' families then, they wouldn't have suggested that it was creating anti-Arab hatred. In contrast, the immediate reaction by the US administration to Al-Jazeera when they had interviews with victims or showed children in hospital was that it all increased Arab rage against us.

BBC Four: Did the whole experience make you re-appraise your impression of how the media works?
JN: I think it confirmed what I already knew - that the media is about a system more than just a few people at the top who hold all the strings. A lot of it is about competition and appealing to your audience. I hadn't realised that so much of the American audience had gone over from CNN to Fox News, and this was part of the reason that CNN changed its programming to the more patriotic, flashier kind of line. In a way Al-Jazeera has managed to emulate those same Western standards in terms of their news presentation.

Also, I had no idea how the news was put on the air. When you watch it at home, you feel like you're presented with fact, when in fact there is so little time to check anything. People rush to get their stories on air and then the other networks scramble to get a Pentagon spokesperson to confirm it. It was a very hectic place and it felt like the battle of reporting war is perhaps as frenetic and disorganised as the war itself.

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