PressEthic

Americans interested in getting news from Al Jazeera will be able to access it streamed over the internet. (Just hope the feds aren't listening in to the internet) Hassan M. Fattah reports in The New York Times that

The station has struggled to break into American cable television markets, where most operators have decided against adding it to their offerings.

But, the article points out that Al Jazeera International isn't terribly interested in American viewers anyway:

The new channel is about the untapped world of English speakers in the East, increasingly frustrated with Western coverage of their world. When it goes live, it is expected to have access to 40 million homes — most of them outside Europe and the United States.

I think we Americans could benefit from a news source from the Middle East that doesn't filter everything through the lens of U.S. interests. American mass media has long deprived us from having a deeper understanding of the region. Fattah says:

In effect, Al Jazeera International intends to become for the developing world what Al Jazeera became to the Arab world: a champion of forgotten causes, a news organization willing to take the contrarian view and to risk being controversial.

And the new operation has already attracted prominent journalists:

The channel has signed prominent journalists, including the host and commentator David Frost; the former BBC correspondent Rageh Omar, and a onetime CNN anchor, Riz Khan, as well as numbers of producers and reporters from Western networks and some unknowns with a decidedly international look.

Reuters reports that Al Jazeera may serve to fill a vacuum in international news, drawing comparisons to the BBC's international model.

Peter Preston, former editor of Britain's Guardian newspaper, said it had become increasingly evident new voices with different opinions were needed on English-language networks as one all-encompassing 24-hour news channel was not enough.

"CNN can attempt to do that by running hugely different programs ... to the rest of the world than it does in America. The BBC can attempt to do it by a massive amount of fairness and balance in the traditional BBC way,'' he told Reuters.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the network evolves, since their role for the last 10 years has been controversial and influential in the Middle East and mostly just controversial in the West.