Al-Jazeera’s English-language channel launched today. I just watched the inaugural broadcast of Riz Khan’s daily one-hour show. It consisted of two long interviews, one with the Palestinian prime minister, Ibrahim Haniyeh of Hamas, and one with Shimon Peres, Israel’s vice-premier. Riz posed questions that were substantive and reasonably challenging, including a number sent in by viewers. It was interesting enough though the demure pace — you might say sedate — took some getting used to; the long-form interview format is only as good as the interviewees. The Peres segment was the more watchable, while the Haniyeh segment suffered from long, awkward pauses while Riz’s questions were being translated, off air, into Arabic.
As I write this, an hour-long news show is under way with anchors in Doha, London and Washington and correspondents deployed in a number of locations. The global-South aspirations are made clear, with a reporter in Tehran, an interview of Congolese president Joseph Kabila, and a feature story from Brazil. The voices are mainly British, and of these, several are desi; others include former BBC reporter Rageh Omaar and other veterans of established UK and other outlets. The weather announcer is British and blonde.
The news hour pace is slower than CNN but faster than Riz’s show, very much in line with what you get on British and European news channels. It’s quite pleasant, actually. The overall production values are strong. So is the website, which has been totally overhauled from its previous atrocious state; it now looks very nice and has a good clear interface, although it’s still quite thin on content. To watch AJE in the United States, you will need to go through the website as there are no US distribution deals in place yet, and who knows when there will be. The site offers two feeds through RealPlayer: the low bandwidth feed, which I watched, worked fine, although it automatically ends after 15 minutes (you can just press play and it restarts); a high-quality feed is also offered for $5.95 per month.
The jury is out and no doubt will be for quite some time, but once I lowered my metabolism to the right level, I actually started to find the broadcast quite interesting and refreshing in its choices of topics. Nothing politically controversial has happened yet, and the presenters regularly read viewer email, including negative comments. It’s been striking so far how many of the comments, both positive and negative, come from people in the US. Perhaps the producers are emphasizing these on purpose.
My principal criticism so far is the overall global-antiseptic style that makes you feel like you are in a hotel room on some business trip even when you aren’t. But that’s a problem all these international news channels share. Here’s an early, generally positive, assessment from The Times of London; a profession of faith by the English program editor in The Guardian; and a Washington Post feature on Dave Marash, the Washington anchor.
It appears that lack of “free space on US Cable networks” delays availability for at least a year. Bollywood programming doesn’t seem to have this problem.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?from=rss_World&set_id=1&click_id=&art_id=qw116359686247B236
Ehh. It’s just like BBC World – pity, because the Al Jazeera arabic channel has a lot more energy and good debates on Arab politics.
I’ve never watched this channel or the parent network, but I’d like to know if the same biases appear on both.
Siddharth, Good post. I have been told my some reliable sources (not Howard Kurtz!) that Al Jazeera Arabic is pretty similar to Fox News (in degree) in its presentation and slant.
I went to j-school with an Al-Jazeera English producer. I, too, think the jury is still out, but here are some of her words regarding the launch (she chooses not to be quoted by name):
I don’t think the English and Arabic versions of Al Jazeera are very similar. As someone pointed out, the Arabic version is far more sensationalistic and also, has a lot of Islamic programming. I doubt the English channel will be any of that.
siddharthA
siddharthA
not siddarth, not sidarth,
siddharthA
he’s too nice to complain but I’ll complain for him
do you have to pay for it? i didn’t see a free video stream anywhere on the site.
RealPlayer?! So they really are terrorist pawns…
The people who go on about Al-J’s biases and sensationalism and so on usually are those who have never watched it and do not understand Arabic. Some of the talk shows are Fox News-like, but for the most part the “bias” is very similar to the bias towards India and Indian interests you’ll find on NDTV, or towards the US and its interests that you’ll find on the American networks. In the same way that NDTV picks up on issues of interest to desis overseas and perceived slights and we occasionally have talk show guests ranting about Pakistan and terrorism and no one dares criticise Indian policy in Kashmir, similarly Jazeera will focus more on Palestine and use the word for “resistance” rather than “insurgency” in Iraq (though they stopped that after a while, I think). Big deal.
By and large, their reporting is good, and they have great hard-hitting talk shows on Arab politics and political reform where they put authoritarian schmucks used to dealing with servile state-owned TV in the hot seat, which is fun. Hugh Miles and Marc Lynch (who has the Abu Aardvark blog – v.g.!) have books on Al-Jazeera that are based on real research, if anyone is interested.
Jehane Noujaim’s “Control Room,” the 2004 documentary about Al-Jazeera, is well worth watching. I came away from it with a deep awe for journalists in general, and the ones who work for Al-Jazeera in particular.
Too bad that, to the average American, Al-Jazeera is seen as a mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I have never watched it before but now that i am trying to log on to its website from work, its blocked. CNN, BBC etc are not blocked….
Shooting at Al-Jazeera journalists/center in both Iraq and Afghanistan go down in my book as the low points of both the Afghanistan and the Iraq war. I do understand that its very possible that they were both accidents but I remain unconvinced.
A news channel that gives video coverage of Osama’s videos – which are personally handed over to them by his cronies. How does it even begin to compare to NDTV? Have they ever shown a video of a Indian terrorist (Sikh, Muslim or Hindu) seeking the murder of thousands on the basis of religion? I’ve not seen NDTV do that.
Btw, I have seen Control Room.
Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, Bin Laden..etc have accused Al Jazeera of being a mouthpiece for the Americans, and several Arab countries have blocked programming. Control Room insinuates that Bush wanted to bomb their offices in 2004. Perhaps they’re doing something right to invoke the wrath of fanatics from all sides.
Here is a clip of Dr.Wafa Sultan’s well circulated exchange with a cleric.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAXoDHy3_Ek&mode=related&search=
One may not agree with her, but Al Jazeera is providing her a platform to express her viewpoint. Something I haven’t seen FOX do in a fair and balanced manner.
Mr. K – I agree with your Control Room thoughts. It was probably the best documentary (along with Fog of War, although I’ve not watched The Corporation yet) that year (well, I saw them both the same year).
From Slate’s article on Al-J:
Another article I read recently (I forgot to add it to my del.icio.us and can’t find it though) talked about the alleged Al Qaeda mouthpiece bit. The Al-J rep they were interviewing basically said that their network has the largest reach in the Arab world, so if you wanted someone to broadcast news about your group, obviously you’d go to the network that had the widest reach. It doesn’t sound like a rocket science conspiracy to me…
“servile state-owned TV” Al-Jazeera too is state owned isn’t it? I mean, Emir of Qatar = Qatar.
Also, one doesn’t have to understand Arabic to get the message that Al-Jazeera is trying to convey as mentioned by someone here. AJ has a reputation for sure, and it ain’t peachy rosy.
There are some different perspectives here – http://www.aim.org/briefing/4992_0_5_0_C/ and http://www.aim.org/aim_report/4877_0_4_0_C/ and a report from 2005 – http://www.aim.org/aim_report/3664_0_4_0_C/
I was quite pleased ot hear this on the radio today – albeit with a different perspective…
One of the featured programming on JalJeera (hat-tip to jai’s bauji) today was a story on women going missing on a rural stretch in B.C. Nothing new, eh? Well – it is, because in hearing that story I was reminded of the numerous pieces one sees in vestern media on random human rights abuse in a random backwater on the other side of the world. and this was the (healthy?) perspective taken by cbc – in that we seem to pride ourselves on ‘forward-thinking’ etc. but it has taken a foreign network to shake things and bring to public attention that had fallen below the radar. i am sure it made some folks sit up and take notice at the shift in the (information) power dynamic.
this exchange of information and perspectives is important. not only will it provide us another perspective of goings-on in a relatively unknown part of the world – but it will also shed the scales off folks in that part of the world that it isnt quite peaches and cream out here.
ggggnite folks. be cool and rule.
Quizman and RR – 95% of Jazeera programming has nothing to do with airing clips by bin Laden and his pals. Now admittedly those are thorny ethical questions for journalists but I’m not so convinced any old news channel wouldn’t air them, given the scoop.
If you think the Qatar government has any input into the editorial process at Jazeera (though there are two or three times where they’ve had the channel tone down criticism), and that this is in any way comparable to regular Arab state-owned TV, you’ve clearly never watched any of the TV stations in question and are working on stereotypes. Repeating the stereotypes third-hand isn’t going to make them true.
All the TV stations, even the pro-American satellite ones, are owned by some sort of Gulfie royals, mostly the Saudis. But they aren’t part of the state bureaucracy and don’t have a government minister at the helm telling them what to say. No more than Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of Star or whatever makes him the editorial boss.
What has this piece of news got to do with South Asia or ‘browns’ in America??..
There are a few brownz who are working for AJ English…
SPIf you think the Qatar government has any input into the editorial process at Jazeera (though there are two or three times where they’ve had the channel tone down criticism), and that this is in any way comparable to regular Arab state-owned TV, you’ve clearly never watched any of the TV stations in question and are working on stereotypes. Repeating the stereotypes third-hand isn’t going to make them true.
Firstly, you don’t know much about me to write those ad hominems and I never compared Al J to other Arabic stations. Secondly, you still did not answer my question on how NDTV’s pro-India tilt can be compared to Al Jazeera’s airing of terrorist videos.
Yes, I have severe issues with Al J airing propaganda videos of mass murdering barbarians. They thrive on publicity and no broadcaster ought to give them a forum to get it.
Secondly, you still did not answer my question on how NDTV’s pro-India tilt can be compared to Al Jazeera’s airing of terrorist videos.
Tapes from terrorists are news worthy items which have been played in all the Western Media as well.
Al Mujahid: Appeal to Common Practice is a well known logical fallacy. I’m as uncomfortable about broadcasters airing videos of terrorists as I would be with a speech of Charlie Mansion being aired. No, this is not censorship. It is pre-emption following Mill’s “corn-farmer-is-a-thief” example.
Correct, but as far as I know, these tapes aren’t delivered to CNN by a chain of couriers (so to speak) stretching right back to OBL and his friends. Hence the problem.
At last summer’s SAJA convention, Riz Khan was asked about how the network gets the videos from terror groups. His answer was that it was a simple matter of having journalists in the field with the right contacts–people who know people who know people. This is what journalists are supposed to do, and if CNN and the BBC had such contacts, then they would have the videos too. As it is now, Al Jazeera supplies the rest of the international media with those videos. CNN airs those same videos–we’ve all seen them and we don’t have Al Jazeera on our cable packages. To say that Al Jazeera maintains some nefarious pipeline to bin Laden is to misunderstand the whole enterprise.
Using “preferred” news outlets to deliver messages and ultimatums long predates al-Qaeda and al-Jazeera. In Europe in the 1970s and 1980s when there was all kinds of terrorism, kidnappings, etc. by groups ranging from the Red Brigades and Baader Meinhof gang to Action Directe and Corsican, Basque, Irish and many other separatist groups, they often sent their messages through mainstream newspapers and television or radio stations.
And don’t forget about the publication by the NYT and Wash Post of the Unabomber’s manifesto.
Quizman, I don’t have to know you – you laid your rather thin knowledge of the subject out there for all to see.
On the question of how NDTV’s India-centrism compares with Al-Jazeera’s Arab-centrism, I think there is a good deal of similarity, particularly in the more emotive talk-shows. NDTV reflects its audience in its choice of relatively upper middle class, nationalistic, anti-corruption ranting talk shows (and I love the station, btw, I just recognize it has its own character). They used to have a show where Barkha Dutt and then various film stars would be sent off to cheer the troops at the frontlines, usually in Kashmir or at the border – that’s a fairly definite political slant. The questions they ask on their call-in shows address a “we” that is urban and quite certaintly middle class/upper caste, and the editorial line towards lower-caste or populist leaders like Laloo Yadav is not sympathetic, though professional. They have on occasion got exclusive interviews with murderers, like the desi-British guy who murdered someone in England and fled back to India, speaking in fairly chilling terms about how they carried out murders. “Sansani” or sensationalistic shows are standard on Indian news channels, and a favourite story theme is backward Muslim clerics and irrational fatwas. The likes of Narendra Modi are given air-time and respect by the channels because they are leaders and newsworthy, though they are arguably responsible for politically-motivated killings too.
I strongly recommend that everyone who thinks Al-Jazeera is the devil’s own work actually watches it once. Or reads books by those who have actually watched and studied it.
Quizman,
Let me answer your question re NDTV vs Al Jazeera. When SP wrote “…very similar to the bias towards India and Indian interests…”, he perhaps wasn’t vigilant enough to notice that his sentence construction forces one to conflate NDTV’s biases in general with a specific geopolitical tilt (i.e. the pro-India bias). What SJ is trying to say is that Al Jazeera’s fondness fo airing Al-Qaeda videos stems from the same impulses that make NDTV (or CNN-IBN, for that matter) so nauseatingly urban-upper-middle-class-oriented in its reporting. To wit: mid-league players will inevitably air content that its core audience want to see and hear.
It is, I’ll admit, slightly rhetorical to say “nauseating[ly]” re NDTV. But NDTV’s penchant for middle-class activism via SMS polls, its overwhelming tilt in favour of anything that the RWA’s say or do, etc., etc., make it very slanted, although its audience is not disposed to realising this. Meanwhile, a thousand farmers quietly commit suicide every month, and NDTV lacks even the basic intellectual will to analyse why this is happening…
Jai, It will be difficult for Al Qaeda to deliver videos to London or New York where most of the Western Media organizations are based. Also as far as CNN/BBC’s ground operations in the Middle East are concerned, the local people might have better contacts with the local Al Jazeera reporters than with CNN/BBC reporters.
SJ: You and I posted our last comments at almost the same time. We say almost the same things. My post was written without knowing that you were at it too; hence I wasn’t trying to repeat what you just said! Hopefully, however, Quizman now sees the point.
Al Mujahid: Appeal to Common Practice is a well known logical fallacy.
Quizman: My reference to Western Media outlets is not a logical fallacy because you are not claiming that CNN/BBC are terrorist lite/enablers. If you are, then I stand corrected.
Al Mujahid: Indeed. My point was that
SP: Ah, anyone who disagrees with your assertion has “thin knowledge”. Once again an ad hominem. Have cup of tea and cool down, young condescending fella!
GB: Fair point. And you have articulated much better than SP. 🙂
How is this Desi?
After the Paks have West-Asians become desis too?
Ah, the bruised desi male ego. Delightful. I am a woman, and stand by my criticisms.
Doesn’t matter what gender you are, it still does not give you the right to post ad hominems. I will refrain from commenting on anything by you till you stop doing that. I don’t want to continue in this vein.
Hypothetical question for you all; Let’s localize this issue here:
Let’s just say late Veerappan is still alive and in his prime today; let’s also say he has the technology – Video camera etc, and does regularly what he had done to his victims, but does it on camera – beheading, execution style shooting etc. What would be the reaction of Indians, especially South Indians, if a favorite TV station of his, Zee, Sun, Surya, Gemini whatever, regularly obtains the videos and airs them on a regular basis, say every time he murdered a human ? Agreed, he sent out audio tapes and allowed himself to be interviewed on camera. But what if the the videos were of the atrocities he committed?
I guess, my question in short is, everything else being the same, how would you feel to have an AJ type of channel over our airwaves in India? Delighted, Disgusted ?
Just curious, that’s all.
PS: SP, how do you know Quizman is a male, or even a desi?
RR – good question on Veerappan. Didn’t he actually give an exclusive interview to a news channel a year or two before he was killed?
If a channel were to broadcast videos of killings/beheadings, I’d think it would be worse for the image of the killers overall – I think that was one of the reasons Al Qaeda and their wannabe imitators stopped making and sending those tapes, because they realized people were disgusted by them. It does raise a question of whether one glorifies violence by showing it in its most gruesome detail – was it correct to show images of violence from recent wars in Iraq and so on, or Abu Ghraib. I think that’s a delicate decision and a news channel may decide one way or the other depending on its goals. Sometimes Jazeera Arabic will show children who have been injured or killed (when the same pictures are considered too gruesome for other channels) because they want to draw attention to the effects of, say, American or Israeli military action. Some American channels would be wary of showing dead American soldiers out of sensitivity to their families or perhaps out of wariness that the images could turn people against a current war. Sometimes they will show US-released pictures intended as PR, for example the pictures of Saddam Hussein on the toilet and washing his clothes in jail. Perhaps the journos among us can comment on the ethics of these decisions, but I for one don’t think it’s as simple as “you show pictures because you are sympathetic to perpetrators of violence.”
Several of the anchors are South Asian, including Shiulie Gosh who is very well known in the UK (she used to be a news anchor on one of Britain’s main terrestrial TV channels), and of course Riz Khan, ex-CNN demigod (I’ve met him briefly — very tall, very wide, very charismatic, and also very polite & courteous towards my parents who happened to be with me at the time).
I agree completely that the “male ego” is a common affliction amongst desis (and I’ve occasionally remarked on it myself here on SM), but I don’t think it’s appropriate to use that particular accusation towards specific individuals without solid evidence supporting it. I doubt that a male commenter casually saying “Ah, another neurotic confused desi woman” would be deemed acceptable behaviour (again, at least without firm prior evidence indicating this to be true about the particular commenter he may be referring to), and we can all imagine the cyberlynching that would immediately occur. I’ve found Quizman to be a thoroughly decent contributor during his participation on this blog.
I did not mean to insult anyone – I was merely amused at how Quizman responded to my criticising him and RR for vigorous and misguided assertions about Al Jazeera by calling me a “condescending young fella” – a slightly clumsy attempt at asserting authority. Scrolling back, I think Quizman and RR’s points were conflated in my mind as I responded to both – so I may have assumed Quizman said something that RR said, for which I apologize. People’s assumptions about Al-Jazeera do irritate me, particularly as the strongest responses tend to come from those who have never watched the darned thing and are responding to very narrow parts of the station’s programming (rather like, say, Arabs who believe that Abu Ghraib is representative of all of American military history).
I’ve been away from desiland long enough that it was mildy amusing to be reminded of how desi men assume everyone is male till proved otherwise. But that’s just one of the joys of this blog.
Most men in general do that (regardless of their background), unless something about the other commenter’s handle or the contents of their posts indicates otherwise. It’s not a specifically desi thing.
SP: was merely amused at how Quizman responded to my criticising him and RR for vigorous and misguided assertions about Al Jazeera by calling me a “condescending young fella” – a slightly clumsy attempt at asserting authority.
Scroll up and you will see that my response was to your ad hominem; “Quizman, I don’t have to know you – you laid your rather thin knowledge of the subject out there for all to see.” and you continued in the same vein.
Not once did I accuse you likewise in my responses before the one you’ve quoted. In fact you started your first comment with “The people who go on about Al-J’s biases and sensationalism and so on usually are those who have never watched it and do not understand Arabic.”, which is ingenious considering that the stiff criticism they have got from Arab columnists.
All I am saying that is that you can make the discourse more useful and your points more “readable” if you refrained from making generalizations like those. Which is why GB’s points came across better than yours since they are more credible and fact-based.
Anyway, this aside is distasteful to me and this is my last post on this topic.
“Stiff criticism from Arab columnists” – can you point to any articles for me? Which Arab columnists? Jazeera tends to be criticised by political leaders in the region who are mainly authoritarian or monarchical because they essentially provide a platform to criticise said leaders. A few columnists from papers like Roz al-Youssef and Al-Ahram in Egypt, which are state-owned and reflect the state viewpoint, or from the Saudi papers that can’t risk offending the al-Saud ruling family, may voice some criticism, and there is genuine debate over showing messages from Bin Laden and images of violence in the Arab media sphere, but by and large I don’t hear sweeping criticisms of Jazeera as a channel, quite the opposite.
If you respond to critiques without facts, then you do set yourself up to appear poorly-informed.