The Only Show in Town

Oct. 22 issue - Many local television stations in the United States have more impressive headquarters than the Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel in the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. The portico smells vaguely of sewage used to fertilize potted plants. The offices are stacked with boxes of files or videotapes. The electronics are state of the art, but terminals are few, and the staff is small—“about 500 people all over the world working very hard,” says Assistant Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Sheikh. Yet they may well be putting out the most important, and certainly the most controversial, news coverage on the air right now. Al-Jazeera, rightly or wrongly, has gotten a reputation as the Osama bin Laden Network.

“Do you think there should be only one opinion? Should we deal with only one side?” — MOHAMED JASEM AL-ALI

IT IS THE ONLY company allowed to broadcast directly from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (where television sets are banned). And when bin Laden or his Al Qaeda spokesman wants to make a statement, they have a tape dropped off at the Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul. Within minutes their message is broadcast to millions of Arabic speakers around the world, and, very quickly after that, picked up and translated by other news media. No wonder U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell jawboned the Emir of Qatar this month, trying to get him to rein in the network he finances. When that failed, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice floated the idea that bin Laden may be sending secret messages to his terrorist cells through the videos.

But Al-Jazeera Managing Director Mohamed Jasem al-Ali, 46, is unrepentant—and a little baffled. “Really, we are surprised to be asked to tone things down,” al-Ali told NEWSWEEK. “We defend freedom of speech, and we are covering both sides. I think we are covering the Americans more [than the Taliban or bin Laden] because they have more facilities.” Last month, Secretary Powell himself gave an 11-minute interview to the station. Last week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair took up half an hour and Graham Fuller, formerly one of the CIA’s top Middle East analysts, appeared on one of the station’s most popular talk shows.

InsertArt(1214804)As for coded messages, al-Ali says he has no idea if they’re there, but he plans to keep running the tapes, and keep broadcasting from Kabul. “Do you think there should be only one opinion? Should we deal with only one side?” Although Washington has criticized the network for inflaming opinion, Al-Jazeera often acts as a corrective for the incendiary rumors circulating on the Internet, on the streets and in other less responsible media of the Muslim world. One such tale is that 4,000 Jews did not go to work in the World Trade Center the day of the attacks. When a caller mentioned that conspiratorial fantasy on a talk show, the commentators immediately dismissed it, says al-Ali.

In fact, it’s precisely because Al-Jazeera presents the most balanced and verifiable Arabic news that the majority of people in the Middle East have ever seen broadcast that it’s become such a powerful force after only six years on the air. Often called “the CNN of the Arab World,” it reaches a regional audience much larger than the American all-news network, and one much hungrier for news.

Until the mid-1990s, most of the dictators and potentates in the Arab world were fighting a rear-guard action to keep all “foreign” television out of their realms. During the Persian Gulf War in 1990, even CNN was not available in most Arab capitals. Saudi Arabia and other countries looked for ways to ban satellite dishes. But to no avail. Dishes were smuggled, officials were bribed, and parabolic antennae became ubiquitous.

Finally, many Arab governments decided to join the competition for their fellow Arabs’ hearts, minds, and advertising dollars. But Egypt, which was the natural leader with a long history producing entertainment, never broadcast credible news. Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri owns the richest of the Lebanese satellite stations, Al-Mostaqbal, but his network has to be wary of offending Damascus and Riyadh. The Saudi-financed BBC satellite service in Arabic, which might have dominated the market, collapsed over censorship issues.

Al-Jazeera started operations in 1996 with a six-hour-a-day schedule. Qatar’s Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who had just ousted his father, wanted to create a more democratic aura for his country. He saw Al-Jazeera as a way to publicize the new liberalism on his little peninsula, which has only about 100,000 citizens. The result, as al-Ali wryly notes, is that, in terms of its reputation, “Al-Jazeera has become bigger than Qatar.”

The breakthrough for the network came during the massive late-1998 air war on Iraq, called “Desert Fox.” The bombing was supposed to force Saddam Hussein to allow United Nations weapons inspectors back into his country, but it failed. Arab viewers watched in fascination as the Iraqi dictator once again defied Washington. The beginning of the new intifada in Israel last year was an even more riveting spectacle. Al-Jazeera covered the violence up close, with great emotional impact. Within days it was running a telethon to help the Palestinian victims, and people from all over the Arab world were pledging donations.

But Al-Jazeera also prides itself on the fact that it was the first Arab TV station to invite Israelis onto its shows, providing at least a semblance of balanced coverage by allowing them to argue their case. And on several occasions it has angered Arab regimes in the region with its critical reports on their countries. After visiting the station, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak made the oft-quoted remark: “All this noise from this matchbox?”

Today, Al-Jazeera is planning to expand. It hopes to offer a package of channels with news, documentaries and business coverage. One other likely project: English-language programming that would reach non-Arabic-speaking Muslims—and the United States—next year. By then, Washington certainly hopes, Osama bin Laden will be off the air.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.