WASHINGTON, 27 March — Who doesn’t know Al-Jazeera, the controversial 24-hour all-news network based in Qatar?
The first independent Arab news station is watched in more than 20 Arab countries, and in tens of thousands of homes in the United States.
Until Sept. 11, most Americans had never heard of Al-Jazeera. But now an estimated 200,000 US subscribers pay $29.99 a month for the cable channel package that became available about four years ago.
Many of the American-Arab viewers live in San Diego County, California, which is home to one of the nation’s largest Arabic-speaking populations in the US. Many of these viewers say they need Al-Jazeera to supplement inadequate, incomplete and biased US coverage of the Middle East.
One of those viewers is Nasser, director of sales for a wireless infrastructure company and president of the San Diego chapter of the Muslim American Society based in Washington. He initially bought the package before Sept. 11 so his children could learn Arabic. But now Al-Jazeera has become an important news source.
“Most of the Arab community has Al-Jazeera,” Nasser said. “It’s mainly because they want to hear the other side of the story. Most Arab-Americans believe the media has certain skews, and they’re not sure of the whole story. It’s always good to hear the other side to make up your mind.”
Some media experts, academics and members of the Arab community say Al-Jazeera has a credible, balanced perspective that in some instances has been superior to reporting on US television. Just after the attacks, US networks were faulted for what critics said was a parochial, flag-waving approach to the news.
Others disagree, saying it is anti-American and, even worse, pro-Osama Bin Laden. Some see the popularity of Al-Jazeera — a station that refers to suicide bombers as “martyrs” and the Israeli army as an “occupying force” — as a dangerous phenomenon that stirs up extremism and jeopardizes US security.
Al-Jazeera has angered some US officials by airing numerous statements from Bin Laden and Taleban leaders. The most recent Bin Laden video prompted a feud between CNN and Al-Jazeera when CNN aired it first, saying the Arab station sat on it for months. Al-Jazeera severed an alliance between the two.
“Al-Jazeera ... may not officially be the Osama Bin Laden Channel, but he is clearly its star,” wrote Fouad Ajami in a recent New York Times Magazine article.
Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the author of “The Dream Palace of the Arabs.”
Anti-American and anti-Israeli views “drive the station’s coverage. ... Day in and day out, Al-Jazeera deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage,” Ajami wrote.
Some US media experts and academics dismiss that analysis, calling it hypocritical.
“So criticize CBS for being the mouthpiece of the Bush administration,” said University of California San Diego Communications Professor Dan Hallin, who has written several publications on the role of the news media in Vietnam, Central America and the Gulf War.
“The really impressive thing about Al-Jazeera is that for the first time a very large Arab audience is getting professional news coverage of issues important to them and they are hearing debates on a wide range of sensitive political issues that normally their governments wouldn’t allow them to hear before now,” said Michael Hudson, professor of International Relations and Arab Studies at Georgetown University.
Hudson, who speaks Arabic, became a subscriber after Sept. 11.
US government officials, threatened by Al-Jazeera after Sept. 11, at first attempted to pressure the government of Qatar, which funds Al-Jazeera but does not have editorial control.
Eventually, the Bush administration tried a different approach. Several top US leaders began appearing on the Arab station as talk show guests, including Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld.
“I think it did look bad when the US tried to get the government of Qatar to crack down on Al-Jazeera,” said Hallin of UCSD. “I think it looked really hypocritical that here we are, supposedly in favor of a free flow of information, and we’re trying to win the propaganda battle by suppressing the flow of information.”
Others agree that the Bush administration’s rewarding of Al-Jazeera, while ignoring access to other respected Arab publications, is just plain wrong. “Rather than Al-Jazeera, the Bush administration should work with the media outlets across the (Middle East) region that are popular and highly regarded, where it has the best shot of getting a fair hearing,” Mideast specialist Mamoun Fandy recently wrote in Pharaohs magazine.
“Three pan-Arab newspapers — Asharq Al-Awsat and Al-Hayat, both based in London, and Al-Ahram in Cairo — have the respect of readers across the region. The best, Asharq Al-Awsat, distributes in 19 Arab countries, plus Europe and the United States. Its readership is estimated at half a million, its website is the most popular in the Arab world and receives an average of 1.5 million hits per day.
“This paper has the region’s best coverage of the war on terrorism, but when it sent requests for interviews to the State Department and the White House two months ago, it heard nothing,” wrote Fandy.
