The Sweet and Sour Success of Al-Jazeera

By TBS Senior Editor S. Abdallah Schleifer

Why is Al-Jazeera, the satellite television channel transmitting from Qatar—a small, relatively obscure Gulf Emirate—so popular, so powerful that it is starting to change the face of Arab TV news broadcasting?
Al-Jazeera's impact is so powerful because until ten years ago TV journalism as we know it did not exist in the Arab world; because free-ranging public affairs interview and talk shows with viewer participation via telephone did not exist in the Arab world.

In 1975-76 I spent most of my time in Beirut covering the Lebanese civil war as an NBC producer/reporter and acting Beirut bureau chief. It was the biggest story in the Arab world; nothing else much was happening in the region. Yet aside from the Lebanese themselves, not a single Arab national (the euphemism for state owned and directed) channel sent reporters, producers, or camera crews to cover the war. Why bother? TV was the most tightly policed of all media. In many Arab countries the minister of information made his offices in the same building that housed the national channel or channels and the news bulletins existed to a greater or lesser degree to glorify the leadership, be they left wing or right wing, socialist or monarchist.

The reasons for this tight control were several. In authoritarian countries with high rates of illiteracy, television (and radio) is a particularly dangerous medium. Unlike Arab newspapers, which were privately owned in politically moderate Arab states or had a history of private ownership prior to nationalization in the Arab socialist republics, TV channels were state-established from the beginning. They had no sense of mission beyond serving the state in the field of "information" as well as providing popular entertainment.

One other critical factor. Even the journalists and editors in the state-owned newspapers generally had access to newspapers from Paris, London, New York. The Arab print journalists knew by example what the international standards of journalism were, even if they could only hope to barely approximate those standards in those days in their own work. But television in the age before satellites was the most provincial of media, with transmission ranges of 50 miles. The typical Arab broadcaster could not learn by comparison. BBC Radio had a great impact precisely because it was accessible; BBC television was not.

The idea of journalists and in particular of TV journalists exercising their judgment as to newsworthiness was inconceivable. Whatever the head of state did was the lead item of the day—even if intrinsically un-newsworthy—followed by routine activities of his ministers. The ruler and his ministers held "important meetings" (pictures of the cabinet) or had frank or friendly discussions with visiting envoys (handshakes and shared cups of coffee) but rarely did the leading stories contain content.

Since it was the partisan position taken, not the newsworthy event itself, that mattered, the channels made use of global news agency footage (while complaining at UNESCO conferences about the Western monopoly of global news dissemination) while the news bulletin presenters read remotely connected copy from the state news agency that reflected the position taken on an given pan-Arab event. To put it another way: since it was the partisan position taken and not newsworthiness that mattered, why bother covering an event in any but the most token sense of a cameraman recording official formalities for domestic news, or the channel using TV news agency pictures for pan-Arab stories like the Lebanese civil war. Why bother with TV reporters? Indeed no one did. Why bother sending a cameraman to take pictures of the Lebanese civil war—if it was pictures and not coverage or understanding that was sought, then why go to the expense when far cheaper agency footage was available. And why worry about losing your audience when only the state had a tightly exercised monopoly on broadcasting and there were no satellite TV channels (Arab or non-Arab) to provide external competition?

When I served in Cairo as NBC News bureau chief from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, and I needed some public visibility to help get a scarce extra overseas phone line installed in the bureau or an interview with a minister, I would take my crew out to cover a public event where President Sadat (who had lifted censorship or restriction of movement for the foreign press corps in Egypt in 1974) would be present, even though the event was of no interest to NBC. Mike in hand, I would ask the president a question or two. The Egyptian TV cameramen covering the president's every public movement had no reporters of their own, so they would jump at the opportunity shoot my "interview" sequence. That evening and the following morning I would appear prominently on the local TV news bulletins. Since there were no satellite channels around offering alternative fare, everybody—including the recalcitrant minister or the uncooperative telephone and telegraph official—would see me with the president and respond to my requests respectfully.
What changed everything was CNN. In America CNN established itself as the channel for round-the-clock news coverage of dramatic events with its live coverage from Saudi Arabia and Baghdad during the buildup and on into the fighting of Desert Storm. And since satellite dishes were beginning to appear in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and CNN had recently begun transmitting its signal internationally on a powerful satellite that reached the Arab world, suddenly CNN offered an alternative form of news coverage which large numbers of Saudis and Egyptians were now exposed to, as both countries began to rebroadcast CNN on spare transmitters as the conflict intensified. So CNN, in the Arab world, became a model for imitation—not by the bureaucratic and routine-driven national channels (except in the cosmetic sense of spiffing up the studio sets for the news bulletins and picking up the pace), but by a new privately owned channel, MBC, established in London by Saudi businessmen with close relations to the Saudi royal family.

Since MBC was established to compete for advertising with the Arab national channels, it sought superior production values—and that included doing real TV journalism, covering stories in the Arab world with correspondents directing camera crews and writing scripts for their own finished news reports. MBC was a great success in the early 1990s among those who owned dishes, but that was a far smaller number than those owning them today. When MBC was retransmitted terrestrially (no satellite, no dish, just an ordinary antenna) from Bahrain, an island barely a stone's throw from eastern Saudi Arabia, MBC's market share, especially during the news bulletins, was greater than the Saudi national channel in the eastern provinces. At the same time MBC gave the Saudi and allied Arab political establishment a wide berth in its news coverage without the embarrassing syncopy of the national channels, so MBC's compromises didn't seem in comparison so terribly compromising.

Orbit, another private satellite Arabic language operation also with close ties to the Saudi ruling family but a rival to MBC, started up in Rome a few years later but as multi-channel network with one channel produced by the BBC and known as BBC Arabic News but paid for by Orbit. This new channel provided true news stories, informed professional reports from the field. Orbit also introduced freewheeling talk shows in which guests of widely varying and often radical political persuasions engaged in fierce debate. Many of these guests, whether left wing nationalists and socialists or right wing Muslim fundamentalists, were generally excluded from single party or single family Arab authoritarian political life, so these programs became widely popular. BBC Arabic News collapsed in little more than a year because of a quarrel over editorial control between the Saudi owners of Orbit and the BBC, but the lively talk shows continued on other Orbit channels. continued

So the stage was set for Al-Jazeera, which started up five years ago as a state-financed satellite channel that more resembles a public broadcasting operation like BBC, or even a privately owned channel, than the state owned and directed national channels of the rest of the Arab world. The chairman of its board is the nephew of the ruler of Qatar, but he is a journalist in his own right as much as he is a businessman. And Qatar, unlike Saudi Arabia, is not a regional power with all of the inhibitions that come with such power. On the contrary, the ruler of Qatar is committed to transforming this emirate into a liberal constitutional monarchy, and he has abolished the ministry of information as a branch of government that is incompatible with a free press and liberal society. Al-Jazeera fits into his vision. Many of its correspondents, producers, and talk show hosts were recruited from among the one-time staff of the BBC Arabic service, which has ensured Al-Jazeera an incredibly sophisticated studio look and an approach that reflects the BBC World Service tradition of a far more serious journalism, far more field reports or "packages," than the at-times glitzy but usually more shallow quality of CNN's coverage.

Al-Jazeera, a 24-hour all-news channel that pursues both aggressive field reporting from across the Arab world as well as from all major news centers outside the Arab world, has also produced its own freewheeling talk shows with viewers commenting or asking questions by telephone. The Al-Jazeera motto for both news coverage and talk shows is, in literal translation from Arabic, "Opinion and Another Opinion," which is the equivalent of that Anglo-American journalism 101 axiom "get both sides of the story."

So Al-Jazeera has invariably stepped on many toes, which are particularly sensitive in authoritarian political cultures where anyone in authority rarely has his toes stepped upon. The price it has paid has been periodic closure of its bureaus in many Arab countries, and a relative lack of advertising because of fear by the multinationals that if they advertise on Al-Jazeera they may be cut off from advertising in Saudi media—and the Saudi domestic market is much bigger and richer than the tiny emirate of Qatar. But Al-Jazeera's popularity throughout the region is extraordinary, and the degree of satellite dish penetration of the markets so extensive in recent years (the receiver dishes getting smaller and cheaper, the satellite transmitters getting bigger and better) that Al-Jazeera now has a bigger market share than any one national channel at nearly any given time.

Just as CNN established itself in America as the channel of choice for ongoing, highly dramatic events because of its nearly non-stop and largely live coverage of the Gulf War, so Al-Jazeera definitively established itself as the Arabic satellite station of choice, with its correspondents out in the streets reporting on Arab resistance and Israeli repression, during the Intifada that has raged on in the Israeli-occupied territories of Arab Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza for the past year and has spilled over in the form of radical Palestinian terrorist attacks against civilians within Israel in more recent months.

At the risk of permanently losing their audiences, some of the Arab national channels are now establishing news bureaus and erratically but increasingly producing field reports of their own. However, they frequently rely on APTN (Associated Press TV News) to find and if necessary train reporters in the field for them—these new bureaus are customized bureaus, so to speak, because the Arab national channels by and large lack the trained personnel and the competitive drive to do it by themselves.

Al-Jazeera's present assets in Afghanistan, its unique access, directly stems from its special relationship with Osama bin Laden established over the years when, as a outcast from the Saudi establishment, bin Laden had little hope of access to either the national Arab channels invariably allied with or at least beholden to Saudi Arabia, or the Saudi-owned private satellite channels. Al-Jazeera cannot be faulted as a mouthpiece for bin Laden anymore than CNN could be faulted as a mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein because of its unique, indeed exclusive television news assets in Baghdad during Desert Storm, when all other TV journalists save CNN's Peter Arnett and company were ordered out of the country.

Has bin Laden made use of Al-Jazeera? No doubt, just as Saddam Hussein made use of CNN. (Where was CNN when Iraqi troops stormed into Kuwait and looted and raped during the first days of the occupation? Certainly not there as guests of the Iraqi ministry of Information.) But Al-Jazeera doesn't just broadcast bin Laden videos. It produces packages on the Northern Alliance and does frequent voice interviews with the Northern Alliance's foreign minister, who is the Alliance's most articulate and active spokesman. Al-Jazeera was as proud of the exclusive interview it managed with Tony Blair, following the bin Laden tape broadcast the day the US bombing missions began, as it is of its bin Laden exclusives. And as a matter of course it carries all of the important Washington pronouncements on the war Against terrorism. But does the fact that Al-Jazeera has superior assets than any other channel inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan skew its coverage, with more time allotted to bin Laden and the Taliban than other channels? No doubt, but the same could be said about CNN's overkill (and frequently boring) use of its Baghdad assets during the Gulf War. The only difference is that Al-Jazeera, in the strict terms of producing informative field reports rather than live camera comment, does a better job (like its mentor BBC) than CNN. Al-Jazeera's journalism (in the strictest sense of the word—which means not its often problematic talk shows) on occasion transcends the channel's very self-conscious sense of Arab identity. Al-Jazeera has become in this present crisis as much a global player as CNN or the BBC World Service.

Within the Arab world, the long-term effect of Al-Jazeera cannot be but a positive one. Al-Jazeera encourages a new political culture more responsive to facts than conspiracy theories, more gratified and empowered by a journalism that seeks objective truth then a journalism solely of self-confirming perspective. In its commitment to free expression it is the logical ally of any emerging civil society. If it has inflamed the Arabs by its powerful visuals of Israel's cruel repression of a Palestinian people resisting occupation, it has also interviewed Israelis when no other Arab channel would; provided forums for Arab-Israeli debate when no other channel would, and has provided the possibility that Arab perception will shift from demonizing an entire people to a discriminating sense of what forces in Israeli society would perpetuate occupation and injustice and what forces would and have truly sought a just peace.

So too its impact today. There is no question but that the bin Laden tapes are having a horrendous impact on the Arab streets. He is emerging as the mythic right-wing Che Guevera of Arab street culture. It is bin Laden's outwardly gentle manner and soft speech, the simplicity of his outward appearance, and above all else his citation of injustices and American double standards familiar to every Arab—including the overwhelming majority of Arabs genuinely horrified by the murder of nearly six thousand innocent souls on September 11—which have made the tapes so dangerous, so potentially destabilizing. And yet if CNN, without a moment's hesitation as an American practitioner of journalism, can run those tapes as a professional duty to its viewers, how can we so easily fault Al-Jazeera? The bin Laden tapes pose a recurrent dilemma that conscientious journalists always worry about and have never resolved: where their responsibilities as journalists end and their responsibilities as citizens and defenders of decency begin.

But in the end a major part of the power of those tapes is that they occur in a vacuum, among the present timidity of the moderate Arab leadership—which has had in some cases to fight ferocious, deadly battles with its own homegrown terrorist networks that have regrouped abroad under the banner of bin Laden and the patronage of the Taliban. Where, in the almost arrogant imperial indifference of American war planners to obvious basic intelligence (a forgotten art at the CIA since the late 1950s) are the counter-bin Ladens, as once upon a time we successfully allied and assisted Christian Socialists, Social Democrats, and even Trotskyists in the Cold War against Stalinism for the soul of Western Europe?

Burhanuddin Rabbani, president of the remnant pre-Taliban Afghan government in semi-exile that is supported by the Northern Alliance, was a student at Egypt's great center for Islamic theological studies, Al Azhar University. He writes poetry in Persian and speaks fluent Arabic. He is the civilized face of Afghan Islam. Why hasn't Rabbani been encouraged to tour the Arab world, and through his public presence and his interviews on Arab television, be allowed to open the minds of the Arab masses to the crimes of bin Laden and the Taliban? It is this void, this timidity, this moral indifference on the part of both American and moderate Arab leaderships, as well as America's double standard towards Israel and the Arabs (scandalous in the eyes of nearly everyone in the world but America and Israel) that provides the context that makes these tapes so dangerous, as much if not more than Al-Jazeera's audacity in playing them. TBS

Ref:tbsjournal.com transnational broadcasting journal.com