THE global media landscape is set to change dramatically this Wednesday as the Qatar-based satellite channel al-Jazeera’s launches its 24-hour English news service. The channel, which has been at work for a long time, is being seen in the media world as the first influential rival to dominant news channels such as the BBC and CNN. Al-Jazeera already has a formidable 50-million viewership — mostly in the Middle East; the number is expected to grow exponentially when the English news channel goes on air.
   Over the last two years, al-Jazeera English has openly stated that its goal is to fill a void in international broadcast media created by, what the majority world considers to be, a poor one-sided pro-US-UK coverage of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that they have seen beamed to their TV screens. While the journalistic credibility of the twin news super-stations BBC and CNN have been corroded by their reluctance to take an anti-establishment stance on the ‘war on terror’, al-Jazeera has quietly reported the human casualties – both Allied and Iraqi – from the frontlines, defying the US Army’s warnings to stay clustered in Iraq’s green zone to avoid becoming ‘collateral damage’. This effort to bring home the images and the stories that the other channels never got hold of has become the Qatar-based channel’s biggest strength.
   ‘We’re trying to enable viewers to put on different spectacles,’ Nigel Parsons, al-Jazeera’s managing director, told the media last week. ‘We will cover stories that others are not covering,’ he added. This, it seems, is going to be the abiding mantra for the channel: not so much to beat dominant Western channels at their own game, as much as to offer viewers what they would never see on US- and UK-based channels.
   Al-Jazeera has also established that it’s not playing for peanuts. Over the past two years since the channel was planned it has bagged reputed media personalities such as David Frost (of the BBC’s Breakfast with Frost fame), Rageh Omar who reported for the BBC out of Iraq in the weeks following the US invasion, Riz Khan (of the CNN’s Q&A with Riz Khan fame), former CNN and BBC anchorwoman Veronica Pedrosa, the BBC’s Stephen Cole, as well as a clutch of mid-level US and UK producers and anchors to its English service.
   What has further strengthened the channel’s prospects has been the series of lies coming from the Bush-Blair axis that has been exposed since the invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration used WMD and Saddam’s alleged links to al-Qaeda as a rationale to invade Iraq. Judging from the enthusiasm for war, or lack of resistance to it, in the weeks preceding the Iraq invasion, it would have seemed that the major news channels had been privy to the proof that Iraq did indeed possess WMD. Since then, it has been proved over and over that the spin doctors at the White House and Downing Street were simply packaging lies with corroborations from dissident Iraqi groups and unreliable Iraqi spies abroad, and sending them on to the news desks around the world, where they were swallowed hook, line and sinker.
   Last December, a far more diabolical media conspiracy was exposed by the LA Times in the US, when it reported that the Bush administration had paid a company called Lincoln Green over $240,000 to prepare fictitious reports of US triumphs in Iraq, translate them into Arabic and ensure that they were carried by leading Iraqi newspapers.
   It has been a victory for the majority world that these lies have been exposed, since we frequently bear the brunt of meddling or expansionist ambitions of the US and its allies, riding on the backs of such lies about our own countries.
   It’s important to remember that al-Jazeera was first catapulted into fame after the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, when Osama bin Laden started using the channel as a conduit to disseminate video-taped messages to the global media. While the Bush administration had on many occasions tried to accuse the channel of having ties to terrorist groups, al-Jazeera has always maintained that it did what any other channel in its place would have done: reported the news that it had gained access to. According to media reports, the channel sells Bin Laden footage to other networks for as much as $20,000 per minute.
   Since then, al-Jazeera has remained a thorn on the side of the Bush administration, reporting civilian casualties in Iraq, while the US military was claiming that it was using precision warfare to bomb specific terrorist targets in Iraq, and earning further ire by reporting US military deaths, which inevitably translated into political black eyes at home. So much so, that on April 16, 2004, US president Bush reportedly discussed with British prime minister Tony Blair his intention to bomb the channel’s headquarters in Qatar. This information came from a Downing Street memo of the White House summit leaked to the UK tabloid Daily Mirror by top British bureaucrats who have since been charged with violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. Although both the White House and Downing Street claim that the threat was made in jest, the British government has refused to make the full contents of the memo public. ‘Al-Jazeera infuriated Washington and London by reporting from behind rebel lines and broadcasting pictures of dead soldiers, private contractors and Iraqi victims,’ the Mirror reported.
   This information, of course, came to light a year after the US had already tried strong-arm tactics, presumably to silence the channel. On April 8, 2003 al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad was attacked by US forces, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub and wounding another, even though the US military had been informed beforehand of the channel’s precise coordinates in Baghdad. The fact that the US had launched a missile attack on al-Jazeera’s Kabul office on November 13, 2001 during the invasion of Afghanistan lent strength to the argument that the channel was being targeted. Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj, a Sudanese national, has also been held by US forces since the start of 2002 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On November 23, 2005, Sami Al-Haj’s lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith reported that, during (125 of 130) interviews, US officials had questioned Sami as to whether al-Jazeera was a front for al-Qaeda. The reasons for his detention remain unknown.
   In fact, one could judge al-Jazeera’s commitment to journalism by the list of the enemies it has created. One of the channel’s biggest critics in the West was former US secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld, who regularly slammed the channel for airing messages from Iraqi dissidents and claimed it had been infiltrated by terrorists. In 2004, the channel’s Iraq office was shut down by the puppet government of Iyad Allawi for presenting a negative image of Iraq and fuelling anti-coalition sentiments.
   The media response to al-Jazeera has also been heartening. To counter its critical views of autocratic Middle East regimes, Saudi investors set up the channel Al Arabiyya in 2003. In 2004 the US responded by funding the launch of a rival Arabic channel called Al Hurra, and now the BBC has reportedly pulled out over $30 million from its Eastern Europe channels to launch an Arabic news channel.
   There are more than a few reasons why the majority world should revel in the launch of al-Jazeera’s English service. For one, it looks likely to become a crucial source of news with ideological underpinnings that are different from those based in Europe and the US, even if they do have a Middle East bias.
   What is important to note is that unlike in the US or the UK, Qatar or even the Middle East at large does not have legions of English speaking journalists who will now be sent out as foreign correspondents around the world. Instead al-Jazeera is recruiting local or regional journalists as foreign correspondents, where the BBC and CNN sends UK, European, or US journalists. This move to recruit local journalists will inevitably result in a more refined, moderate and contextual presentation of the countries being reported on. In short, this will radically change the nature of foreign reporting in the global media, as the majority world will now see a more accurate representation of their countries and societies on their TV screens.
   There are, of course, fears that the channel’s agenda may be hijacked by the religious right wing or that the channel may voluntarily tone down its sting to do business in countries like the US or the UK, which are huge markets for any broadcast service in English. These are perhaps valid fears. On Wednesday, however, I hope to be tuning in, if not to give lie to the news from Iraq I find on the CNN, at least to see it from an Arab point of view.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com