{"article":{"id":11597,"heading":"al-Jazeera overview","author":"The Guardian (London)","created":"2001-10-11 13:37:06","modified":"2005-08-15 00:40:36","last_modified":"Mon, 15 Aug 2005 07:40:36","article":"
Tuesday October 9, 2001
The Guardian
As the bombs fell on Afghanistan on Sunday night, Mohammed Kicham, the
Qatar-based anchorman of al-Jazeera television, was talking to camera
when a voice came through his earpiece. \"Mohammed,\" it said, \"you're now
on CNN... and BBC... and Sky News.\"
Suddenly, a sizeable proportion of the world's population was glued to an
Arabic- language satellite channel that most people outside the Middle East
have never heard of, transmitting from a place that even fewer have heard of
- Doha, the capital of Qatar on the Arabian peninsula. For the best part of
half an hour on Sunday night the world stayed with Doha, and is likely to
return again and again because al-Jazeera is the only channel with a live
link to Kabul.
Wars may be tragic but they can be the making of journalists or TV
channels. Who had ever thought they would spend hours watching CNN until
the night, in January 1991, when flares, bombs and tracer bullets lit up
the sky over Baghdad? Who had heard of Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw or the
al-Rashid hotel?
This time round, CNN found itself in the wrong place and al-Jazeera has
become our window on to the war, providing exclusive footage from
Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan. For Kicham, though, sitting in his studio
in Doha, the TV war did not begin well. Expecting a scene similar to the
attack on Baghdad 10 years earlier, al-Jazeera had set up a night-sight
camera over Kabul. But all it showed was flickering green images of next to
nothing. \"When it started, it wasn't a real war as seen on the screen,\" he
said. \"Kabul isn't a big city with lots of lights.\"
But the channel was soon boasting its second scoop of the night. The battle
had not been under way for long when a man with links to the Taliban
arrived at the station's office with a package: Osama bin Laden's
pre-recorded video message to the world. (By yesterday afternoon different
versions of the way in which al-Jazeera obtained the video were circulating,
including one in which it was deposited from a speeding car.)
Al-Jazeera's Kabul reporter, Tayfeer Allouni, watched it then called Doha.
The station's executives quickly recognised the exclusive they were sitting
on and, without viewing it themselves, told Allouni to feed it straight on to
the airwaves. \"We trust our reporters,\" one of them said afterwards.
Al-Jazeera, uniquely, has a permanent 24-hour-a-day satellite link to
Kabul, plus others in Baghdad and parts of Africa. In Kabul, the link has paid
handsome dividends. Last January, the channel broadcast exclusive footage of
Bin Laden sitting serenely on a carpet at his son's wedding. It also
transmitted pictures of Taliban fighters dynamiting the Bamiyan Buddhas
and, last week, the demonstrators who stormed the US embassy in Kabul and
ripped down the large American seal.
The channel's Afghan outpost is not a plush studio but a small, ramshackle
building where visiting dignitaries have to be filmed outside or, more
likely, on the roof. The rudimentary conditions occasionally produce
moments of tragi-comedy. One of these came on Sunday night while
Mohammed Halimi, one of the staff of the Taliban foreign minister, was
being interviewed - live - on the roof.
\"While Halimi was speaking we heard a big noise, like a bomb,\" Kicham said.
\"Suddenly we had no picture and no sound at all. After about five minutes,
the sound came back and Allouni reported that a bomb had fallen nearby.
\"I'm sorry,\" he told the studio in Doha, \"but the cameraman has disappeared
and I've no idea where he is.\" The cameraman, it turned out, had fallen off
the roof. \"Fortunately, it's not a high building,\" Kicham said. \"So he climbed
back and finished the interview.\"
In the five years of its existence, al-Jazeera has become the most-watched
satellite channel in the Arab world and has infuriated every government
from Libya to Kuwait - both of which once threatened to pull out their
ambassadors from Qatar in protest.
What draws the viewers is not soaps, millionaire quizzes or
Big-Brother-style reality TV, but news and political debate of a kind that
the Arab world had never seen until the channel started in 1996. It has
become the channel that Arabs turn to for big events - such as the
Palestinian intifada or the Afghan conflict - though in some countries they
are technically breaking the law if they do.
Some describe it as \"the Arab BBC\", which is not surprising, given its
origins. They lie in the mid-90s when the BBC set up an Arabic-language TV
channel and contracted - unwisely as it turned out - with a Saudi satellite
company to transmit its programmes to the Middle East. It was not long
before the Saudis, unhappy with the content, pulled the plug.
That would have been the end of it had the Emir of Qatar not offered $100m,
spread over five years, to fund a new and independent-minded TV station.
Ready-trained staff from the BBC channel joined it en masse, bringing - as
they see it - BBC values with them.
Qatar - with a native population of only 500,000 - was not the likeliest
home for such a project. Ruled by the al-Thani family for almost 150
years, it was a British protectorate until 1971. It depended mainly on pearl
fishing until oil discoveries made it rich and led to the creation of an
all-embracing welfare state.
The present emir, who deposed his father in 1995, has brought in a series
of liberal reforms - among other things, allowing women to vote and stand
for office in the first council elections two years ago. But apart from
promoting liberal ideas, al-Jazeera proved a remarkably cheap way of
giving Qatar more international clout. \"The emir's television station is
bigger than his country,\" the information minister of Syria grumbled
recently.
The first reaction to al-Jazeera, recalls Yosri Fouda, deputy executive
director of the channel, was utter shock - both from governments and
ordinary Arabs. This was not because the station said anything particularly
radical. Much of its news would be considered perfectly normal on
English-language television, and its political debates reflected the everyday
arguments that Arabs have in private among family and friends. But the fact
that it aired these issues in public, and in Arabic, broke a taboo. \"It makes a
hell of a difference when you say it in Arabic,\" says Fouda, who worked for
the BBC before moving to al-Jazeera.
As Arab governments recovered from the initial shock, they set about
attacking it. Qatar came under diplomatic pressure, Saudi advertisers
boycotted the station. \"We just reported the insults,\" Fouda says.
Nowadays, some of the pressures have gone as Arab leaders have developed a
love-hate relationship with the station. Some, such as President Salih of
Yemen, readily denounce it but can't wait to appear on it.
None of this had been of much interest to the United States until last week,
when secretary of state Colin Powell decided to have a quiet word with the
emir, asking him if the station could tone down its coverage of Afghanistan.
The emir responded by telling the press.
For Nadim Shehadi, of the Centre for Lebanese Studies in Oxford, the rise of
al-Jazeera is a lesson in the perils of censorship. \"By trying to censor the
BBC, the Saudis created an opportunity for the creation of something that
was much worse for them. If you try to censor, you don't know what is going
to come out.\"
In a region where states still try to control the supply of information, there
was panic when governments realised that viewers were turning away from
official TV channels where the first item of news is usually the king or
president greeting important visitors at the airport. In some countries,
even the editors of supposedly independent newspapers are liable to be
summoned to explain themselves to the minister of information if the
leader's picture does not appear on the front page above the fold.
Al-Jazeera, Shehadi says, is helping to change all that. \"It has had an impact
on the whole of the media in the region. The others are forced to catch up and
compete - even the printed media. There's a lot more freedom now, because
there's no point in controlling information if you know that people are going
to find out from somewhere else.\"
One of al-Jazeera's mainstays is its studio debates, where viewers can phone
in. Sometimes they go on for hours, with the antagonists wagging fingers and
screaming at each other. It's cheap television, but no one could accuse
al-Jazeera of dumbing down.
\"It airs all the frustrations of the region,\" Shehadi says. \"It's deliberately
aiming to be controversial and to upset all the governments in the region.\"
But some suggest that its search for scoops has brought it a little too close to
Bin Laden and the Taliban. A subtitle on Sunday night, which talked of the
Taliban firing at \"the enemy's planes\", certainly raised eyebrows. But Fouda
says the channel has had direct contact with Bin Laden only once - for the
famous interview in 1998, which it repeated recently.
More controversially in the Middle East, al-Jazeera has never had any
hang-ups about interviewing Israeli politicians. Back in 1996, it was the
first independent channel in the Arab world to do so. \"Last month we had
Shimon Peres in our London office,\" Fouda says. \"He praised al-Jazeera on
air for its credibility and professionalism.\"
If Al-Jazeera has a flaw, Middle East observers say, it may be that it
occasionally fails to distinguish between being controversial and
inflammatory. Mustapha Karkouti, a journalist and media consultant who
has covered the Middle East for many years, says: \"It's happened with the
intifada, with Iran and Bin Laden - and that's not good for the station.\"
For al-Jazeera, worldwide fame may have come at just the right time. The
Emir's $100m subsidy runs out at the end of this year, and then the channel
will have to stand on its own feet. But the staff are confident. Advertising is
looking up, they have a new deal with BskyB to be included in its digital
package, and they're talking of floating the company.
Meanwhile, the royalties are pouring in from their exclusive Afghan footage.
\n","contact":"","link":"","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"--- excellent overview of al-Jazeera, the 'CNN of the Muslim world'","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2001\/10\/al-jazeera.txt","filesize":"10.2 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2001\/10\/11597.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]}