If Doha is the capital of the state of Qatar (pronounced CUT-tar), known for its 900 trillion standard cubic feet of proven gas reserves (and more than 15.2 billion barrels of oil), Al-Jazeera has become known here as "the Capital of Doha." In a few short years, this satellite TV station has become the electronic capitol of the Arab world — and the fifth best-known brand in the world.

"Jazeera" means island but, in many ways, this emerging global broadcaster functions more like an oasis in the desert country where it is based, as well as in the international TV news industry in which its dedication to hard-charging news makes it an anomaly.

Before Al-Jazeera's emergence, Doha had a sleepy, if less than stellar, international profile.

"In 1991," sneers former terror czar Richard Clarke in his book "Against All Enemies," "Qatari police cars that were escorting my motorcade managed to crash into each other in a city with almost no traffic."

Today, the city is bursting with rush-hour traffic and a construction boom, thanks to the vision and guile of its ruler/emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, who not only hosts the largest U.S. regional military base outside of Iraq (which spawned the Coalition Media Center during the invasion of Iraq), but earlier patronized Al-Jazeera in 1996 and serves as its chairman.

The channel emerged after the BBC trained journalists for an Arab-language news service, only to drop the project after an attempt was made to censor its programming. Key staffers reorganized and found support for an Arab media initiative based in a Gulf State — then pictured as a tool of U.S. interests.

To many, it seemed like a contradiction, and ironically, for many years Arab governments denounced Al-Jazeera's interviews with opposition figures while militants who hated its interviews with Israelis and U.S. officials considered the channel too-pro U.S. Before the Iraq War, "60 Minutes" featured a profile of the station as an example of a new tilt towards pro-American democracy and modernism.

A further irony: the channel's reach had originally been limited by the lack of a transponder on the most desirable satellite. When a French TV company mistakenly broadcast a hardcore X-rated film in prime time, and lost its access in the resulting scandal, Al-Jazeera was given the nod to expand its footprint to the whole Arab world.

Within months, the Bush Administration pronounced it the anti-Christ for its airing of interviews with Bin Laden and other "evildoers." Donald Rumsfeld fulminated against Al-Jazeera for "manipulating world opinion." Yet for all the show of might so far, U.S. imperium has not squelched Al-Jazeera's voice even as an administration that claims to support a free press still seeks to suppress it.

Today this campaign escalated with an article by Dorrance Smith in the Wall Street Journal's rightwing op-ed section, a former executive producer at ABC's "Nightline" who left network news to work on Republican political campaigns and most recently, for Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq -- which was accused censoring and suppressing news not favorable to the US war.

Citing no evidence, Smith accuses Al-Jazeera of colluding with terrorists and demands that U.S. networks not run the network's footage. (Al-Jazeera's office has already been closed by the U.S.-backed transitional government. Earlier its lead correspondent in Baghdad was killed when its office was bombed by U.S. forces. An Al-Jazeera cameraman was detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib prison and accused of staging news, a charge that was never corroborated.)

"The collaboration between the terrorists and Al-Jazeera is stronger than ever. While the precise terms of that relationship are virtually unknown, we do know this: Al-Jazeera and the terrorists have a working arrangement that extends beyond a modus vivendi."

Notice Smith's use of the term "we." The article reads more like a smear -- making a claim, but no case. It is significant that a former-newsman-turned-political-operative is being used to persuade news organizations that have grown somewhat more skeptical about administration campaigns of denigration against war critics and critical journalists.

Visiting Al-Jazeera

While in Qatar as a guest of Al-Jazeera's first TV production festival to show my film "WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception)" to a very receptive audience, I was invited to visit the newsroom and do an on-air interview in the studio shown in the film Control Room.

In network TV terms, Al-Jazeera is tiny, crowded with reporters and producers squeezed around pod-like tables churning out packed newscasts on a 24/7 basis. The whole operation would fit into a corner of the spanking new CNN news operation I toured recently in the opulent Time Warner Center in New York's Columbus Circle. Visiting Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak likened it to a "matchbox," saying, "All this trouble from a matchbox like this."

There was literally no place for a visitor to sit, so I shared space in the chief editor's tiny office, which has three desks and as many cell phones ringing off the hook as he heatedly defends a decision to his boss, or barks orders to the director to add pictures or sharpen up the questioning of correspondents whose stand-ups from various hot spots flash across the screen.

There is an aura of no-nonsense earnest professionalism in the building. On the wall, the Al-Jazeera Code of Ethics in English and Arabic mandates a strict separation of news and opinion. It was developed in response to constant criticisms, some fair, many not, of on-air bias. (Read the full ethics code.)

I told the chief editor of being interviewed live on Fox News when it aired a story deriding the code. I called it "a good idea" and suggested that that Fox should try it.

The reaction was nothing short of horror.

"Are you suggesting that Fox is like Al-Jazeera?" was the dismissive comeback.

"I am not the first one," was my rejoinder.

The two networks are news leaders, but clearly inhabit different worlds with far different worldviews. What does connect them is an aggressive attitude and love of controversy.

Al-Jazeera talk shows are outspoken but open to all points of view in the spirit of "the opinion and the other opinion."

Fox prefers more predictable opinions and its own "message points." One of those messages is to constantly target and caricature Al-Jazeera even as it spent as much as $10,000 monthly to buy its feed, according to Hugh Miles'. excellent new book on Al-Jazeera, "How Arab TV News Challenges America."

Offering More Services, Going Global

That challenge will soon no longer be limited to its approach to news. Al-Jazeera's one satellite news channel is already spawning a larger media company with websites, wireless news, a sports channel, a children's channel and a documentary channel.

But the big news — and the buried lead in this article — is that Al-Jazeera is going global, launching an international channel in English that plans to be on the air in 2006. Its goal is nothing less than to "revolutionize viewer choice." It is a bold challenge to western TV hegemony.

This is good news for the vast audiences defecting from network and cable news for its tepid and celebrified and sanitized coverage. Al-Jazeera promises a fresh approach with news features and analysis that it insists will be "accurate, impartial and objective." It will show hard-hitting documentaries, air live debates from bases in Doha, Washington, London and Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital.

It has assembled a team of TV pros from BBC, APTN, ITV, CNN and CNBC, among others, and will have 40 bureaus worldwide.

"Al-Jazeera International is a World Channel for the 21st Century and it is the channel the world is waiting for," according to its idealistic proclamation. Its programmers are already buying up documentaries and seem to relish having a go at the news companies they have departed, at least according to a spirited conversation I had with programming director Paul Gibbs, who worked with BBC and the Discovery Channel. I was very impressed with the multinational members of the corporate strategy team that are gearing up a sophisticated approach to build a new, more global Al-Jazeera.

The conservative news world will be waiting and watching, and so will alternative media channels like Link Television or the new International World Television channel, which hope to do something similar.

Unlike the alternative media groups, Al-Jazeera does not seem to be lacking in money.

The Challenges

But challenges remain: Can they get carriage for their channel on cable and satellite systems controlled by Western media cartels? Getting their signal up is far easier than bringing it down into people's homes.

More importantly, can the Al-Jazeera approach, which has been associated with controversy and terrorism, find a receptive audience among viewers who have never really seen its news product (and couldn't understand it if they did), but have been prejudiced against it all the same? Will they/we tune it in and give it a chance?

It's always hard to be the last kid on the block but these kids (a) are not such kids; (b) have a lot to say; and (c) know how to say it.

As the demoralized, compromised and dumbed-down news system in the West implodes with mounting scandals and the erosion of both viewers and credibility, is there a new savior, a genie in the bottle arising in the East?

Twenty-five years ago. I worked in the basement of what was once the Progressive Jewish Country Club in Atlanta on another news venture that wanted to change the world. It was dismissed by the TV industry as the "Chicken Noodle Network." Its founder, Ted Turner, had a grand vision that was co-opted by parochialism, greed and market logic. Years later, he would be bemoaning the big media outlets he sold out to.

A quarter of a century later, it's time for someone else to give it a try.

Years ago, a critic wrote of hearing the "future of rock and roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen."

I may have just seen the future of global television, and its name is Al-Jazeera.

(Perhaps Al-Jazeera will morph into "Al Jaz" in the way that Federal Express became Fed Ex.)

Who knows, but we all know, in shallah, we need something new in TV news, don't we?

News Dissector Danny Schechter, a former CNN and ABC News producer, is the "blogger in chief" of MediaChannel.org and director of a film critiquing media coverage of the Iraq War, "WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception)." Visit wmdthefilm.com for more information or write David@wmdthefilm.com.

© 2005 MediaChannel.org

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