Happy Birthday Al Jazeera

November 15, 2007 marks the first anniversary of the launch of Al Jazeera’s English service. The Qatar-based 24-hour TV news station has quickly built up a good reputation for the quality of its journalism and, according to its Managing Director Nigel Parsons, “proved the sceptics wrong.” Apart from those in the US, that is.

It’s still almost impossible to find Al Jazeera on any of the US cable systems, and that’s a pity because in my opinion it delivers an international news service that is infinitely superior to what’s on offer from the domestic US networks, including Fox News and CNN.

Cable company concerns

Americans are able to view Al Jazeera via its website, and the majority of the comments I’ve seen from those who have done so are in favour of it being shown on TV screens in the US. The problem is that the cable companies are unwilling to sign carriage agreements with Al Jazeera in case this upsets the US government, or harms their business, such as consumers terminating their contracts in protest.

Other Western countries are more relaxed about Al Jazeera. In Britain, which stood shoulder to shoulder with the US over the decision to go into Iraq in 2003, Al Jazeera English has been available on the Sky satellite platform since Day One, and there appears to have been no backlash. On the occasions when I have watched Al Jazeera, it has struck me as a network which strives to cover areas of the world that the US and British networks tend to overlook - large parts of Africa, for example.

Selective snippets

The problem, of course, is that before Al Jazeera English was launched, those outside the Arab World usually only saw snippets of Al Jazeera when it broadcast video messages from Osama bin Laden on its Arabic service. Western TV channels always seized on these broadcasts as major news items, and created the impression that Al Jazeera was just a mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda. They did not report the reactions and analysis to these bin Laden videos within the Arab world, notably on al-Jazeera itself.

There’s an irony about the US attitude to Al Jazeera. On The Nation website, Kristen Gillespie notes that “The headquarters of the channel that has been branded “Terror TV” by some US officials is only half an hour away from one of America’s most important strategic outposts, where tanks and planes damaged in Iraq are repaired and sent back into battle.” Yes, there’s a US airbase in Qatar, even though most American’s aren’t able to watch an English-language TV station from there.

Internal debate

Although the English service made it clear from the outset that it would have its own news agenda, tailored to its international audience just as the Arabic version is tailored to the Arab world, the US media chose to portray it as the voice of Arab extremism. In fact, within both the Arabic and English services, and also between them, there is fierce debate about how the station covers stories. I have seen documentaries, and read the book that was produced to mark the tenth anniversary of the Arabic service, and it’s clear that there’s a wide range of opinions amongst its multinational staff on many issues.

Some US journalists who have actually watched Al Jazeera, rather than just writing about it, have attempted to persuade their readers that it holds nothing to fear. Recently, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote:

“It’s striving for balanced reporting from a distinct perspective seems genuine. A year after its launch, it reaches 100 million households worldwide. Its focus is on ‘reporting from the political south to the political north,’ as Nigel Parsons, its managing director, put it. The world it presents, more from the impact than the launch point of US missiles, is one that must be understood.”

Unfortunately, every time someone from the US right wing sees such comments, they rush to insult the writer and reiterate their entrenched opinions. So within hours of the Times publication, Rick Moran responded in the daily Internet publication American Thinker:

“To compare a media outlet like Al Jazeera that has published outright lies and propaganda about American forces in Iraq with the BBC, CNN, and other western media is as outrageous as you can get. Bias is one thing. Deliberately trying to inflame the Arab world against the United States is quite another. Cohen should be ashamed of himself.”

Mr Moran doesn’t actually quote any examples of the “outright lies and propaganda” that he claims Al Jazeera has broadcast. But, since most of his readers have never watched the station, he is on safe ground, as they’ll probably take his word for it. I don’t expect anything to change soon, and certainly not before a new president takes office. So Al Jazeera will have to wait a while before it gets the chance to demonstrate to Americans that it is not “Terror TV”.

– By Andy Sennitt

WATCH A VIDEO FEATURING HIGHLIGHTS FROM AL JAZEERA’S FIRST YEAR IN ENGLISH.

Popularity: 1% [?]

As a journalist I find Aljazeera to be the least colored of the several sources I go to for news. I find it has reporting on the Americas which the other guys miss entirely.
Its critics would appear to be first closed minded. Secondly suffering from serous ideological problems, which they can cure by examining their own bigot.News is news. These guys are doing what the English speaking networks cannot, telling the truth.

Happy birthday…Aljazeera. We are waiting for you to open up a news center here in Venezuela. You make the difference in the Western World with news that are most likely to be ban in the US. Keep up the good work.

Gerardo Villamizar

Aljazeera is really bringing the balance between the biases that exists hitherto. Africans, particularly those of us in ghana like it and wishes it many more years of making the needed difference.

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