For those of you in Burlington, the city will be holding a meeting for public comments tonight about the recent brouhaha over Burlington Telecom's decision to drop Al Jazeera English from it's cable line-up.  Ken Picard has a piece in this week's Seven Days recapping the ordeal.  I'm getting to this a bit late -- the meeting starts in 40 minutes at City Hall.  It will be broadcast live on Burlington Telecom channel 317.

Read the Picard piece but bear in mind he does a poor job distinguishing between Al Jazeera, the Arab language news agency that was the subject of the film Control Room and has been a controversial journalistic force in the mid east, and Al Jazeera English, AJ's sister English language network, which has only been around since 2006 and which is populated by mostly western journalists who previously worked for the BBC, CNN, and even the US military.  AJE's editorial posture is apparently quite distinct from the older, more controversial network, though both intentionally focus on non-western news stories in an attempt to counter the otherwise steeply tilted-toward-the-west bias of other news networks.  The BT kerfuffle is over the latter but in Picard's piece he mostly conflates the two channels.