Middle East news giant Al Jazeera has gained its first big foothold in the U.S. TV market. Now it has to overcome perceptions of bias.
At the headquarters of the Al Jazeera news network in Doha, Qatar, staffers were getting ready for the big news event of the day: Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo. “Watch, he’s about to announce he’s converted to Islam,” joked one of them.
More Arabs watched Obama’s speech on Al Jazeera (the name means “the island”) than on any other news network. The Arabic language channel boasts 53 million viewers–CNN has 70 million in the U.S.–while its three-year-old sister channel, Al Jazeera English, is available over cable and satellite to 140 million households in 100 countries
On July 1 Al Jazeera English will begin broadcasting in Washington, D.C., its first around-the-clock carriage in the U.S. outside of Toledo, Ohio and Burlington, Vt. Its carrier is MHZ Networks, a nonprofit broadcaster with ten channels of international programming(Russia Today, France 24)in Washington.
“The transition from the Bush era to the Obama era has changed the game dramatically,” says Tony Burman, managing director of Al Jazeera English (or AJE). “As America reengages with the wider world, the appetite for more international news is there.”
Maybe so, but Al Jazeera has a marketing problem that would confound any media expert. Though well respected among Muslims worldwide, in the U.S. Al Jazeera is presumed to be biased against the U.S. and western Europe. It has, at any rate, some controversial connections–or, depending on your point of view, courageous reporters. Correspondent Taysir Alouni interviewed Osama bin Laden just after the Sept. 11 attacks and is now under house arrest in Madrid after a Spanish court convicted him in 2005 of transporting cash for al Qaeda. Correspondent Tarek Ayoub was killed in a U.S. missile strike on Al Jazeera’s Baghdad headquarters in 2003; Alouni, then Baghdad bureau chief, helped recover Ayoub’s body. Then there’s Sami Al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 and held at Guant??namo Bay for six years. Al-Hajj claims that he was beaten and force-fed prior to his release, without charge, in May 2008. In January, during the war in Gaza, the network was the only TV newscaster with reporters on both Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict.
Burman seeks to turn skepticism about the network’s point of view into a benefit. “We aim to appeal to viewers who get tired of Western or American perspectives and want a more global view of the world,” says Burman, who joined the network a year ago after three decades at the Canadian Broadcasting Co. He also takes pains to put to rest one common misconception, promulgated in 2005 by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and repeated on the Fox News Channel: “There’s been no beheadings of anyone ever shown on Al Jazeera.”
Source: Forbes.com
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