An al Jazeera studio

AL JAZEERA ENGLISH COMES TO TOWN

This 80,000,000 audience channel will change the world




About 10 days ago I received a wire notification that the Arab television station al Jazeera was about to start broadcasting in English. That got me interested for my emphasis in this organ is on the affairs of the Middle East in general and the Arab world in particular.

Well, I made a beeline to our family’s Sky television service and trawled through the international stations. Nothing doing.

Subsequently, someone pointed out that al Jazeera was available on Sky but on the news channels, not the international ones.

Since then, whenever I can, I am glued to the goggle box and watching news and views hitherto not permitted from that perspective.

First, I may as well outline the state of play as it were. The channel is available in many countries, mostly via satellite, sometimes via cable. The channel is also available on the Internet.
A low quality RealVideo stream allows viewing of up to 15 minutes at a time. Online subscriptions allowing unlimited viewing may be purchased from Jump TV, Real and VDC.

Although Al Jazeera English is available in the United Kingdom and Ireland (on Sky’s digital platform viewer), the channel has had difficulty securing distributors in the USA where it is thought of by dominant opinion leaders as a “terrorist”channel and an Islamic propaganda tool.

Nevertleless, Intelsat Americas 5 from the provider Globecast carries the network free-to-air on Channel 463 over the USA and Canada.

The channel initially began test streaming Al Jazeera English (then called "Al Jazeera International") in March 2006 on Hot Bird, SES Astra Astra 1E, Hispasat and Eurobird 1.
Telenors, Thor, Türksat and Eurobird 2 were added to the satellites carrying it. Eurobird 1 carried the test stream on frequency 11.681 under the name "AJI.”

So, basically, al Jazeera is on air and on stream.. This is probably the most important media event of the decade because up till now the man in the street in the United Kingdom and the USA, arguably the two most influential nations in the Western alliance, had no option other than to get his news and views from the “approved” outlets.

That amounted, essentially, to the pro-Zionist lobby.

It can be said without enormous exaggeration that a journalist or any other kind of mass media worker who breaks the mould and is not some kind of “licenced jester” commits career suicide at the very least.

Now, news is a commodity these days. I am not going to get involved in the controversy about whether or not the passages in the infamous Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion relating to the future syndication of news is part of a conspiracy. Nevertheless, conspiracy or otherwise, news today is collected and then “wholesaled” by a relatively small number of “wholesalers” such as Reuters, Associated Press and so on.

One can reckon that, human nature being what it is, it is likely that the news streaming in from all quarters does get filtered and approved or disapproved for production on the wires.

Therefore, senitive matters cannot turn up on your television screen or newspaper page because the sub-editors and their broadcast equivalents simply do not get to them in the first place.

Which brings us to guided discussions and panel programmes where the viewer or listener in the broadcast media is encouraged to think that a wide range of opinion is being paraded for his edification and illumination.

In fact, what some people think is that first of all there is agenda setting and secondly there are parameters beyond which views cannot be aired.

By agenda setting I mean the methodology of setting out the terms of discussion by which certain things are not allowed to be brought up. It is like a court case where certain perinent facts are carefully excluded from the examination of the evidence.

By setting parameters I mean the methodology of setting the outer margins of opinion such that the average viewpoint is more or less that of the dominant group in society.

For this reason extremely nationalist people on one hand and anarchists and “terrorists” on the other rarely have the chance to present their own views before the eyes and ears of Joe Ordinary.

We keep hearing about “terrorism” in all branches of the media but rarely, if at all, do we have a real live “terrorist” on our television screen telling us at length why he did what he did on an equal footing with his detractors.

I am not siding with such individuals. I am just pointing out that they cannot reach the mainstream public easily and in large numbers. They are talked about and criticised and analysed from a point of view external to their own.

This is why I am so supportive of the “voice for the voiceless” brigade. There are enormous numbers of people in every country under the sun who are not allowed to have opinions of their own. They are supposed to act under orders with no personal reflections and are not encouraged to express their emotions and their personal thoughts.

For many years the Arab world, apart from its own domestic media, has been in this invidious situation. In fact the Muslim world has been in that category for more than a century.

During the Six Days War I was at boarding school and the “house” where I resided was abuzz over the Arab-Israeli dispute. At that time just about the entire press and broadcast media was pro-Israel. There was talk of “gallant little Israel” and of brave Israeli soldiers keeping watch by night under the stars. Apparently there were no stars for the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian soldiers.

Now, al Jazeera is a news channel and not a news wire service. Therefore it will have to feed off the same stream of information which supplies the other media channels.

But what I want to emphasise is that not all the news does come from the wires. Many large broadcast companies have their own teams of reporters and other kinds of news gatherers answerable to themselves.

Al Jazeera is one of them. It maintains a large group of interviewers and correspondents all over the world who apparently fearlessly report back to the parent company.

What this amounts to, gentle reader, is that in my estimation the whole world can be seen from a new point of view – the Arab one. More generally, the Islamic worldview can now be sampled and tested and compared and contrasted with alternative viewpoints by the discerning viewer and listener.

The Arabic word “al Jazeera” means “The Island.” The headquarters are in Doha, Qatar and it is known for its willingness to broadcast dissident views which has landed it in a great deal of trouble with Uncle Sam and others such as the authoritarian Gulf state regimes.

The station gained worldwide nororiety in the aftermath of 9/11 when it decided to broadcast video footage of Osama bin Laden talking about the happening rather than allowing other people to talk about him..

In addition to al Jazeera English there is also al Jazeera Sports, al Jazeera Live (which specialises in broadcasting live conferences) and al Jazeera Children’s Channel.

In the pipeline is al Jazeera Urdu which will target South Asians and a service which will specialise in documenatry films. Furthermore, the management is considering a music channel and an international newspaper, perhaps an Arab equivalent of USA Today.

On top of that al Jazeera has English and Arabic language web sites which are energetically and frequently updated.

Joel Campagna writes: “There is little question that Al-Jazeera has revolutionized Arabic-language television news in a region that for decades has been accustomed to the stale, heavily censored offerings of state-controlled television.

“Founded in 1996 with a start-up grant of US$140 million from the Qatari government, Al-Jazeera has quickly become the most watched - and most controversial news channel in the region, winning over viewers with its bold, uncensored news coverage, its unbridled political debates, and its call-in-show formats that tackle a range of sensitive social, political, and cultural issues. ”

"Governments from Algeria to Yemen have lodged complaints against the station at one time or another. Some, like Tunisia and Libya, have temporarily withdrawn their ambassadors from Qatar's capital, Doha, to protest the appearance of political dissidents on talk shows or slights made against their leaders.

"A few years ago, Algeria reportedly cut power in part of Algiers to prevent residents from watching a show about the country's brutal civil war. Kuwait temporarily banned the channel's reporters from the country after a caller phoned in and criticized the Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah live on the air.

"Recently, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority temporarily closed Al-Jazeera's Ramallah bureau because of a promotional trailer for a documentary series about the Lebanese civil war that contained an unflattering image of the Palestinian leader.”

Scott Christiansen of the Kodiak Daily Mirror, Alaska says: “I want to see the English language al Jazeera. In the US television is controlled by the cable company that takes the station to my home.

“So ultimately the cable company decides whether or not I see it. Many US residents are using their own dish antennae so they have the choice.”

At any rate with the extremely high standards of performance and star names such as Sir David Frost in line one can expect this beacon of Arab thought to blaze new ways to a straitjacketed world.

THE END

This article was published in the 30th November 2006 issue of the Bangla Mirror newspaper, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the sub-Antarctic.