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Al Jazeera: Middle East
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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?
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The U.S. government has not been the only American voice critical of Al Jazeera. A particularly scathing cover story, by Fouad Ajami, a professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, ran in the November 18 New York Times Magazine. Ajami's piece was based on his viewing of the station's news and talk programming in October, not long after U.S. air strikes on Afghanistan began. He argued that the station had made bin Laden its "star." "One clip juxtaposes a scowling George Bush with a poised, almost dreamy bin Laden," Ajami writes. "Between them is an image of the World Trade Center engulfed in flame." Ajami asserted that "in its rough outlines, the message of Al Jazeera is similar to that of the Taliban: there is a huge technological imbalance between the antagonists, but the foreign power will nonetheless come to grief," and he accused the station of "mimicking Western norms of journalistic fairness while pandering to pan-Arabic sentiments." He cited an October 30 report by Al Jazeera's main man in Kabul, Tayseer Allouni, about which Ajami wrote:
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From a base in the Middle East, Al-Jazeera English is shaking up journalism in the western world and across the globe, the network�s bureau chief for the Americas said. 20 Feb 2008 08:30 GMT
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Al-Jazeera reporters have been detained by U.S. forces and placed in prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It has weathered verbal attacks from U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and from government officials in many countries in the Middle East..
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While prior to September 11th, 2001, the United States government lauded Al Jazeera for its role as an independent media outlet in the Middle East, US spokespersons have since claimed an "anti-American bias" to Al Jazeera's news coverageTemplate:Fact. In 2004 the competing Arabic-language satellite TV station Al Hurra was launched, funded by the U.S. government.
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Now comes Al-Jazeera English, aimed at "English-speakers worldwide," even if most Americans will be able to watch it only on the Internet. (All major American cable and satellite companies have ... far declined to carry it.) Funded, like the Arabic-language original, by the seemingly bottomless pockets of Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the new channel has offices in Washington and London as well as Doha, Qatar, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. So far the emphasis has been on long-form reporting from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia more than from Europe and America; the effect, for an American viewer, has been a bit like looking at a map of the world turned upside down.
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