Move Over CNN
Al-Jazeera Takes Center Stage

She looks like any other TV reporter. But the conspicuous Arabic logo on her microphone marks her as something more. Ghida Fakhry covers New York and the United Nations for Al- Jazeera, the Arabic-language network that has grown so popular that it is considering recording broadcasts in English and expanding its office here.

The breakthrough came during the late-1998 air war on Iraq, called "Desert Fox." The bombing was supposed to force Saddam Hussein to allow UN weapons inspectors back into his country, but it failed. Arab viewers watched in fascination as the Iraqi dictator once again defied Washington.

"Our main goal was to serve the Arab viewer," said Sheik Hamad bin Thamer Thani, chairman of the network's board. "We never expected to achieve global celebrity."

Al-Jazeera reaches 35 million viewers with its news broadcasts, as intelligence and propaganda become crucial weapons in a new kind of conflict.

Because it is the only source of the money shot of modern warfare, video of U.S. attacks from the ground of the city being hit, Al-Jazeera has been very much in demand.

A decade ago we watched Baghdad burn on CNN. This time millions were glued to footage from an Arab satellite channel broadcasting from a nation few of us could find on the map. How Al-Jazeera cornered the conflict.

A record of breaking exclusive news stories that many American networks might envy. According to a joke going around the Middle East, Al-Jazeera is "a country with Qatar as its capital."

The Arabic-language channel was the first to offer uncensored news and talk shows that discussed the taboo topics of religion, sex and politics in a region where government control of the media is routine.

In a country where watching TV or surfing the internet is banned, the Taliban has used Al-Jazeera as one way of communicating with the world.

News or Propaganda?
Al-Jazeera Courts Controversy

Journalists and commentators are now asking whether the station is a balanced news source or a biased outlet for inciting the Arab world against the United States; whether it is an independent news gatherer or a tool in the hands of bin Laden and his propaganda machine.

Does Al-Jazeera provide unfiltered news? Is it broadcasting more accurate and in-depth war coverage of the war in Afghanistan than American networks? Is it revolutionizing Middle East media? And what are its biases? In this interview, veteran Jordanian journalist Lamis Andoni discusses the controversy surrounding Al-Jazeera.

Al Jazeera is simply telling the truth about what is happening in Afghanistan, while CNN and company have switched from "all-Condit, all the time" to "all-anthrax, all the time," making do with videophone reports from journalists in the Northern Alliance's desolate no-man's land, describing the night sky and reading the latest Pentagon press release.

Read Ali Abunimah's ongoing commentary on Al-Jazeera's war coverage, and his 10/11 and 10/14 letters to NPR about its reporting on Al-Jazeera.

Al-Jazeera worked hard covering the Afghan story when the very notion of doing so would have been dismissed at an American news meeting. It is important to remember that the list of American journalists who have set foot in Afghanistan over the past five years is short, indeed.

The situation is similar to the exclusive status granted to CNN in Baghdad during the Gulf War. At that time, CNN came under fire for allegedly being used by Saddam Hussein for propaganda purposes in some of its reports from Iraq. Now, similar allegations are being leveled at Al-Jazeera.

The Arab station that broadcast bin Laden's riposte to the West after the first air strikes on Afghanistan struck a secret deal to screen his propaganda 15 days before the raids. Ibrahim Helal, the station's chief editor, said that the station had actively solicited a taped message from bin Laden.

Stylistically, Al-Jazeera is the most western thing in the Middle East outside of fast food. Is the world's most popular Arab TV network a public-access channel for terrorists or a small sign of Westernization?

In the current crisis, Al-Jazeera's reporting has been straight and sober; a welcome relief from the flag-waving and rhetoric, for example, of CNN. When the bombing of Afghanistan started, the gale that was blowing over London blew away my satellite reception. I was so bereft I found myself gazing at the black screen, trying to stare through it to what Al-Jazeera might be transmitting.

The West Struggles in the Other Air War

This weekend I received a letter from an old friend, a retired American ambassador with long service in Europe and the Arab world. Conversations with Arab friends had convinced him that Al-Jazeera has changed Arab life as much as the September 11 attacks has changed America's.

"We have been hearing from Arab leaders and others who support us who say you guys need to do more, " a senior administration official said, referring to the information campaign. "They say, 'Al-Jazeera is killing us."'

Transcript: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, October 31, 2001

The U.S. takes to the Arab airwaves to make its case against bin Laden - in Arabic - but it still needs local voices to join in.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have all been interviewed on Al-Jazeera. But in terms of content and impact, the interviews have often fallen flat.

The online version of Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera has seen traffic soar since the September 11 terrorist attacks. The largest number of visitors to aljazeera.net, which now serves 3 million page views per day, comes from the U.S., even though the site is in Arabic.

In its war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, the U.S. can rely on intelligence from satellites orbiting the earth. But there is one satellite America cannot control - the one that beams the Al-Jazeera news channel across the Middle East from its studios in Qatar.

For some, Al Jazeera has done a better job covering the war than the U.S. media. "You see in your own eyes the legs and the heads of the civilians (injured and killed) as a result of the coalition," Rasmi Shaker said. "CNN is not showing the human voice of the war. It makes me sick."

The President himself should take the stage through Al-Jazeera. He ought to deliver weekly talks to Moslem viewers, explaining America's goals. Why not have him take calls from viewers. It could be a key part of winning this war.

Interviews with Al-Jazeera are one sign of the administration's intensifying interest in "public diplomacy" -- selling its policies to the public, especially in the Arab Middle East, where U.S. positions have been unpopular for years.

The popularity of Al-Jazeera has increased tremendously among the one million people of Arab descent who live in the United States, most in the suburbs of Detroit, Los Angeles and New York, home to the country's largest communities of first-generation Arabic-speaking immigrants.

Faced with "a battle for the mind" and the need to tell moderate Muslims that the U.S. isn't fighting Islam, Charlotte Beers, the State Department's chief of public diplomacy, says the U.S. is investigating new ways to reach out.

The broadcast, planned by Downing Street as a means of communicating directly with the Arab world, turned into a painful grilling for the Prime Minister.

Transcript: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, October 9, 2001

The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera network has garnered a growing role as a conduit between the Western and Arab worlds. They are currently booking at least six hours a day of satellite time from Washington to the Arab world.

U.S. Attempts to Censor Al-Jazeera

Unless Al-Jazeera itself decides to stop broadcasting Al Qaeda statements, there may be little the White House can do, in technical terms at least, to prevent Al Qaeda from spreading its message by television.

A certain hacking at the foundations of the first amendment - which guarantees freedom of expression and opinion - was embarked on by the U.S. administration while the dust was still settling on the ruins of the World Trade Centre.

It is a phenomenon in the Arab world, a comparatively free, bold initiative in journalism that was supported by the Americans - until it became rather too free.

The Bush administration's efforts to censor a leading Arab TV station are dumb. It should use the station as a means of getting its point across to an Arab public highly skeptical of whatever the U.S. does in the Middle East.

IPI is concerned that the U.S. State Department may be attempting to develop a two-tiered approach to the reporting of events. An approach which enables balanced news stories to be reported in Western countries while trying to prevent similar news stories being aired in the Middle East.

"The administration is urging Qatari authorities to interfere with what is essentially an independent news station," said CPJ executive director Ann Cooper. "Arab government attempts to influence Al-Jazeera have garnered widespread attention over the years. We are disheartened to see U.S. officials adopting similar tactics."

Since its inception five years ago, Al-Jazeera has been the toast of most Western media. But as of this week, the outspoken network has officially been "encouraged" to "balance" its coverage of the region's news, i.e. "tone down" any anti-American sentiment.

Al-Jazeera's confrontation of controversial issues and string of scoops, which have included footage of the infamous Taleban destruction of ancient Buddha statues, has earned it praise both within the Arab world and beyond.

The Al-Jazeera Revolution: Before 9/11

A whole new set of programs which look like typical "inventions" of Al-Jazeera has been introduced to most, if not all, Arab satellite channels. Fouda is Al-Jazeera's London Bureau Chief.

Al-Jazeera has stolen Arab TV audiences from every one of the big powers in the region with its freewheeling debates, uncensored news and, lately, online polling, which is a total no-no in the Arab world.

Every Arab regime has found something in Al-Jazeera's programs to complain about. Qatari diplomats have received more than 400 official complaints from other Arab states about Al-Jazeera since its establishment in 1996.

70 percent of the people living in the Gulf receive their news from satellite television and 60 percent of the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank have access to a satellite dish or frequent an Internet Café.

Arab kings in their gilded palaces tune in every night. Goatherding Bedouins living in ramshackle huts in Israel's Negev desert don't miss a broadcast. On many nights, the regulars at Anaheim's Al Basha Cafe, a popular expatriate, wouldn't dream of changing the channel on the big-screen television.

Qatar's most effective revolutionary enterprise is Al-Jazeera, a satellite news channel, which explores issues that have long been considered forbidden topics in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia and Algeria living rooms have sometimes gone dark when an Al-Jazeera program deemed offensive by those governments has been aired.

I came to recognize something about the TV business in the Arab world: we concentrate mostly upon entertainment, quiz shows, drama, movies. But I think there is an important field that has been missing, talk shows and news.

How is the popularity and availability of satellite television changing the way the Arabs see themselves and the rest of the world? Will increased freedom of information herald a new democracy, or is satellite television just a subtle form of "bread and circuses"?

Qatar has discovered a new commodity more precious than its gas and oil - apower-generating satellite TV.

In the Western world, people digested print well before they digested TV and cable. In the Middle East, it's all happening at the same time. From a Columbia University forum: "Opening the Channels: Television and Society in the Middle East."

Given its proclivity for tweaking official Arab noses, it's doubtful that Al-Jazeera is turning a profit. While the channel¹s owners would like to make money, they certainly realize advertising revenues will remain scarce as long as their mission is to swim against the tide.

The Doha-based channel has become the most freewheeling, station in the Arab world, delighting millions of viewers numbed by decades of censored news on state-controlled television.

The beauty of having a station coming out of such a small country is that the matters that are off-limits are so small, it leaves plenty of room to make a station that everyone watches and all governments hate.

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