Al Jazeera Is Coming, Al Jazeera Is Coming!
By Don | June 26, 2009
Al Jazeera English which has struggled to gain any traction on U.S. airwaves will start broadcasting in Washington, D.C. on July 1.
Note the mention of AIM's Cliff Kincaid
From Forbes
At the headquarters of the Al Jazeera news network in Doha, Qatar, staffers were getting ready for the big news event of the day: Barack Obama's speech in Cairo. "Watch, he's about to announce he's converted to Islam," joked one of them.
More Arabs watched Obama's speech on Al Jazeera (the name means "the island") than on any other news network. The Arabic language channel boasts 53 million viewers--CNN has 70 million in the U.S.--while its three-year-old sister channel, Al Jazeera English, is available over cable and satellite to 140 million households in 100 countries.
On July 1 Al Jazeera English will begin broadcasting in Washington, D.C., its first around-the-clock carriage in the U.S. outside of Toledo, Ohio and Burlington, Vt. Its carrier is MHZ Networks, a nonprofit broadcaster with ten channels of international programming(Russia Today, France 24)in Washington.
"The transition from the Bush era to the Obama era has changed the game dramatically," says Tony Burman, managing director of Al Jazeera English (or AJE). "As America reengages with the wider world, the appetite for more international news is there."
Maybe so, but Al Jazeera has a marketing problem that would confound any media expert. Though well respected among Muslims worldwide, in the U.S. Al Jazeera is presumed to be biased against the U.S. and western Europe. It has, at any rate, some controversial connections--or, depending on your point of view, courageous reporters. Correspondent Taysir Alouni interviewed Osama bin Laden just after the Sept. 11 attacks and is now under house arrest in Madrid after a Spanish court convicted him in 2005 of transporting cash for al Qaeda. Correspondent Tarek Ayoub was killed in a U.S. missile strike on Al Jazeera's Baghdad headquarters in 2003; Alouni, then Baghdad bureau chief, helped recover Ayoub's body. Then there's Sami Al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 and held at Guant??namo Bay for six years. Al-Hajj claims that he was beaten and force-fed prior to his release, without charge, in May 2008. In January, during the war in Gaza, the network was the only TV newscaster with reporters on both Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict.
Burman seeks to turn skepticism about the network's point of view into a benefit. "We aim to appeal to viewers who get tired of Western or American perspectives and want a more global view of the world," says Burman, who joined the network a year ago after three decades at the Canadian Broadcasting Co. He also takes pains to put to rest one common misconception, promulgated in 2005 by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and repeated on the Fox News Channel: "There's been no beheadings of anyone ever shown on Al Jazeera."
That doesn't satisfy Cliff Kincaid, director of conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media. "This is a channel with an anti-American bias that since inception has been known as a mouthpiece of terrorists and of al Qaeda," says Kincaid, who has produced a documentary called Terror Television: The Rise of Al Jazeera and the Hate America Media.
Burman says the network has no connection to al Qaeda and is on a par with CNN International and BBC World in quality of programming. Although the network is owned by the government of Qatar, it is (insist sources in that country) free of censorship or government meddling. Besides, oil-and-gas-rich Qatar is no enemy of the U.S. It's home to the biggest U.S. air base in the region; its biggest foreign investor is ExxonMobil ( XOM - news - people ). Though not as libertine as Dubai, Qatar is a bastion of civil liberties--women can drive, alcohol is not illegal--compared with neighboring Saudi Arabia.
Burman though isn't without his biases. At a taping yesterday for Changin Channels which will be shown as a primer for new viewers Burman in response to a question about Cuba said that it was a vibrant country in a vibrant part of the world. I may be wrong here but vibrant isn't usually the first word that comes to mind when I think about Cuba. Add to that the video clip that included the widely noted and respected media expert George Clooney extolling the virtues of Al Jazeera English and you get the idea of what type of programming they are interested in.
Just a side note about the taping. Even though it was first listed as a public event there was no mention of it on either the Newseum or Al Jazeera English web site and a member of teh AIM staff finally found it here. It looks like they were seeking a very friendly audience and that critics were not invited.
If you haven't seen the AIM mini-documentary you can buy a copy from the web site.
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