Since Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel, first went on the air ten years ago, it has been "a thorn in the side of every dictator in the region as well as of the Bush administration," according to Hassan Fattah of the New York Times.
Critics call it radical; its admirers lionize it. And the network continues to battle accusations that it is sympathetic to Al Qaeda and other extremists.
Despite this tension, Al Jazeera's executives and reporters launched an English-speaking channel on November 15, from broadcast centers in Kuala Lumpur, London, Washington, D.C., and Doha, Qatar. However, these accusations have kept Al Jazeera International out of the United States, as all major cable and satellite providers opted out of offering the channel.
Al Jazeera English has been on the air for a week, which has given journalists a chance to evaluate their coverage and see if it really is, like Donald Rumsfeld said, "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable" (speaking about the Arab-speaking Al Jazeera).
Alessandra Stanley, of the Times likened it to a cross between C-SPAN and Fox News:
The stories are long and detailed (that’s the C-Span part); behind the news reports is an overall sensibility that is different from that of most mainstream television news organizations (that’s the Fox News part).Just as Fox News gives its viewers a vision of the world as seen by conservative, patriotic Americans, Al Jazeera English reflects the mindsets across much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It is an American-style cable news network with jazzy newsrooms, poised, attractive anchors, flashy promos and sleek ads for Qatar Airways, Nokia and Shell. But its goal is to bring a non-Western perspective to the West.
Troy Patterson, of Slate.com, found their coverage to be similar to Western-style journalism in that "its main bias is the universal one in favor of juicy drama." The content was framed around the traditional principles of show business, but, even so, provided a comprehensive look at international events.
In short, Al Jazeera's first week gives viewers the opportunity to see news filtered through the rest of the world (i.e. how "they" see "us"), but it also illustrates the universal similarities. As Stanley said:
Though Al Jazeera English looks at news events through a non-Western prism, it also points to where East and West actually meet. On a feature story, a group of Syrian women, Muslim and Christian, let a reporter follow them on their girls’ night out. Topic A was the shortage of men in Syria.
Anne Noyes @ November 27, 2006 - 11:19am
It's a shame that major cable and satellite providers in the US have refused to offer Al Jazeera English.
I base this statement on several arguments:
1) The major US networks focus their news broadcasts on national news, while local stations seem to devote most broadcasts to coverage of fires, crime, and local "heroes." This navel-gazing reportage makes it difficult for American viewers to keep up with international developments. International by nature, Al Jazeera offers excellent, substantive global news coverage.
2) Let's face it, the American news media is seen as biased in favor of the US by many around the world. For that reason, Al Jazeera English reporters can perhaps get access where reporters for US networks and publications cannot. Al Jazeera English's recent exclusive reports from Myanmar are a good example of this.
3) And, as the sole English language news broadcast with headquarters in the Middle East, Al Jazeera English offers a counter-perspective on the news--both in and beyond the US--that they report. Some may dismiss this perspective as just another version (albeit the polar opposite) of Fox News. But I would argue that exposure to African, Asian, and Middle Eastern-centric "visions of the world" are valuable instructive tools for US viewers, who have been long been living in a protected, US-centric cocoon where headlines feature the Brangelinas and Bennifers of the day and conveniently ignore the civilian dead in countries our military has invaded.
One final note. Pro-US ideology is not solely to blame for the Al Jazeera English blackout in the US. American broadcast regulations (or the lack thereof, which leave de facto regulation to the whims of whoever has economic leverage in the open market) are also to blame here. In an excellent article on Abcnews.com, Tim Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism emphasized this point:
In the meantime, we'll have to make do with streaming broadcasts at http://english.aljazeera.net.
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