This was posted on AGW.
Here's an article that provides some interesting background. It was written in October 2002 before the war, for an audience of US journalists.
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Al-Jazeera. For most Westerners, the name conjures up images of an Arabic CNN-style satellite network that gained notoriety by airing post-9/11 rants from Osama bin Laden.
But talk to al-Jazeera’s news director—editor-in-chief Ibrahim Helal—and you get a much different picture of this Qatar-based news channel. To Helal, al-Jazeera is a responsible news voice that adheres to strict editorial principles: a rare objective news voice in the Arab world, which includes Israeli and U.S. points of view in its coverage.
“Our news philosophy is very simple; we don’t have any agenda,” Helal told Communicator in an exclusive telephone interview from Qatar. “Like every other news organization, we base our editorial decisions on what’s newsworthy and what’s important to our audience. It’s as simple as that.”
“Our editorial policy mirrors that of the BBC’s,” Helal adds. “In fact, when we started, we adopted BBC’s same editorial and presentation standards. Over the years, it has evolved to better suit the needs of our Arabic-speaking viewers, but journalistically we remain very, very close to the BBC.”
If Helal were alone in his opinion, then his assertion could be easily dismissed. But al-Jazeera’s standards have also won respect from numerous Western journalists as well. Take Mike Moran, a veteran foreign correspondent who is now MSNBC's senior producer for special reports and international news. According to Moran, al-Jazeera’s reporters are “very respectable hard-working journalists who have been trained in the West.”
Moran speaks from personal knowledge: He knows many of al-Jazeera’s staff, because back in the mid-’90s, he worked at BBC World Service in London, alongside the newsroom of BBC Arabic Television (BBCATV).
Launched by the BBC and bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, BBCATV was summarily shut down after airing “Death of a Princess.” It was a no-holds-barred documentary about the execution of a Saudi princess and her lover: not a topic the Saudis wanted aired in their country, or indeed anywhere in the world. That’s why they pulled funding for “BBC Arabic,” as it was known, and the service’s 250 journalists were thrown onto the street.
It was the death of BBCATV that led to al-Jazeera’s birth in 1996. Founded by many ex-BBCATV staff—including Helal—al-Jazeera was launched by “the Emir of Qatar and other Arab moderates who had recognized during BBC Arabic’s short life that the long-term interests of Islam would be served best by truth rather than censorship,” said Moran in his MSNBC piece, “In Defense of al-Jazeera”. The network, which is financed by commercial revenues, subscriptions and some government funding, is now available via satellite throughout the Middle East, Europe and North America. Estimated viewership: 35 million.
Max Rodenbeck, The Economist’s Middle East correspondent, echoes Moran’s endorsement of al-Jazeera. “Considering the pressures of trying to be independent in the Arab world—and al-Jazeera has been attacked by everyone from Israelis to Saddam Hussein to the Saudis—they steer a pretty straight course,” Rodenbeck says via e-mail. “I watch it for Middle Eastern news in preference to any other network.”
Does this mean that al-Jazeera’s reports should be taken at face value? No, Rodenbeck replies. “[When it comes to] content, it is certainly mildly biased toward an Arab worldview,” he says, “Exactly as should be expected, and exactly as, for example, the BBC is mildly slanted toward Britain, or CNN toward America.”
“Their credibility is sometimes suspect,” Rodenbeck adds. “They don't go through all the hoops of fact-checking, partly because they don't live in fear of libel suits.”
So why did al-Jazeera air such controversial items as messages from Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda tapes? Because, Helal says, like or it not, they’re news. “We received these messages from bin Laden, and we aired them as we received them,” explains Helal. “We did this in order to provide balanced coverage, just as we also air views from the West, and from Israel. Our goal is to provide accurate, objective coverage of all sides.”
A just argument? Well, it’s the same reason CNN and other U.S. news organizations also aired these tapes, and why American journalists also resisted White House attempts to suppress them.
However, there’s another reason why al-Jazeera is giving such play to al-Qaeda, and that’s ratings! “What you’ve got to realize is that al-Jazeera is ultimately managed by businesspeople, not journalists,” says Moran. “As a result, their newsroom is under pressure to produce numbers, since the network’s survival is really dependent on advertising. It’s a situation most U.S. news directors would understand. The result is that, since 9/11, al-Jazeera’s style has become more populist.”
Does this mean that al-Jazeera has sold out? If so, it’s no more than any U.S. news operation with one eye on journalism, and the other on ad revenues. However, it does explain al-Jazeera’s willingness to air bin Laden.
Finally, the real reason why al-Jazeera’s coverage often seems hostile to Western interests is simply that al-Jazeera is not a Western news agency. Instead, it’s a news service whose 35 million viewers are not only Arabic-speaking, but Arab in culture, values and geopolitical interests. “We are an international news agency, but that doesn’t mean that we should be working from a Western viewpoint,” Helal says. “Our goal is to report the news as accurately and comprehensively as we can, for the Arabic-speaking audience we serve.”
The bottom line: What makes al-Jazeera’s news different from CNN is not al-Jazeera’s journalistic standards, but its editorial viewpoint and audience. For North American news directors, this suggest that al-Jazeera’s reports shouldn’t be dismissed, but nor should they be accepted at face value. Rather, they should be viewed bearing in mind the perspective of al-Jazeera’s reporters and viewers and ratings-focused managers and judged accordingly.
