From the way it has been depicted in the U.S., you’d think Al-Jazeera TV was a nonstop transmission of beheadings and Osama Bin Laden missives operating from the darkest caves of the Middle East.
When veteran newscaster Ted Koppel announced he had talks with the organization after leaving ABC News (for a position he ultimately declined), some reacted as if he were musing about joining al-Qaida.
Some U.S. officials have called Al-Jazeera’s broadcasts “propaganda” and “lies.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called its reports “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”
Last week, Western audiences got to see for themselves when Al-Jazeera English began broadcasting – after a long delay – from its studios in Doha, Qatar, and Washington.
It couldn’t have come with less fanfare in the U.S., probably because no cable or satellite service decided to carry it.
Al-Jazeera English is available online though, in free 15-minute samples at the network’s website (english.al jazeera.net/news) or through subscription services.
By what I saw, it looks designed to be a strong competitor to the BBC World News service, with solid, sober international reports from the Darfur region of Sudan in Africa to Baghdad, Iraq.
It’s a sleek presentation, with lush electronic fanfare that offers more meat than the round-the-clock news operations in the U.S., probably because of its global outlook.
For example, its “world exclusive,” when I tuned in, was the first interview with the newly re-elected president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila, whose election had at that point eluded the notice of CNN.
The U.S. is in the news only peripherally. The idea isn’t to snub America or the United Kingdom but to offer a point of view in which those countries are not always central.
“Our job,” says an Al-Jazeera official in a network promo, “is to demonstrate what’s happening in Asia as a vital part of the news agenda.”
One reporter and host is Riz Khan, formerly of CNN International, a measured presence who split his initial broadcast between interviews with acting Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres. Both also took e-mail questions from viewers, some of which were from the U.S. – clearly it was getting through to somebody.
