*I'm not really buyin' this Alternet thesis, but it would be awesomely strange if market forces annihilated news, so that the only people who knew what was really going on were rich Arabs and their clients. And, you know, all the other discourse was just Third-World-style Twitter bazaar gossip.
*Next up? Venezuela buys Wikipedia.
(...)
Foreign bureaus have been among the hardest hit by cost-cutting measures in print and television media alike. According to the Pew Research Center's annual State of the News Media report, coverage of international events by American media fell by about 40 percent in 2008. Thus has a bizarre situation arisen: at the most interconnected time in history, accurate and comprehensive news of the outside world is disappearing – and with it an informed public.
"The mainstream American networks have cut their bureaus to the bone," says Burman. "They're basically only in London now. Even CNN has pulled back. I remember in the '80s when I covered these events, there would be a truckload of American journalists and crews and editors, and now Al Jazeera outnumbers them all." The channel plans to open ten new bureaus in the coming year, including one in Canada. "At the risk of sounding incredibly self serving," Burman says, "that's where, in the absence of alternatives, Al Jazeera English can fill a vacuum, simply because we're going in the opposite direction."
Today Burman is marking a victory: Al Jazeera English has finally broken into the United States. A non-profit educational broadcaster has agreed to carry it in Washington and twenty other American cities. The breakthrough is a watershed after years of confinement for aje to two small areas in the US (besides the State Department and the Pentagon), and – in stealth manoeuvres that have essentially commandeered new technology to circumvent the blockade – on YouTube, or streaming for free online through Livestation.com. Burman's main thrust, however, has been Canada, which he considers a critical beachhead. If AJE can get permission to broadcast here, he expects to have a far easier time with the commercial American cable carriers that have thus far shied away.
"My hope is that once people see that the sun still shines, kids still go to school, people still laugh at good jokes, and the republic holds," he says, "they will give it a shot."
Al Jazeera built its name on opposing the status quo. The first twenty-four-hour news channel in the Arab world, it was launched by the Emir of Qatar in 1996, a year after he overthrew his father while the old man was holidaying in Switzerland. The coup, which ushered in an era of liberalization in the emirate, was nothing compared with the revolution the channel would create – one arguably as significant for the Arab world as Martin Luther's legendary nailing of his dissident theses to a church door was for Europe. (That old-school press conference, which ignited the Protestant Reformation, took off thanks to a new technology: the printing press. For the Arab world, that technology is the satellite dish.)
The birth of Al Jazeera marked the first time in modern history that a plurality of viewpoints was included in the Arab public discourse – and there was something to outrage just about everyone. With a mandate to broadcast "the opinion and the other opinion" through a mix of news and audience-participation talk shows, the channel gave Israeli and American commentators a voice, along with religious skeptics, Islamic fundamentalists, women's advocates, and political dissidents. The result was accusations from all quarters – that it was an instrument of the Mossad, the CIA, or, of course, al Qaeda. As American political science professor Marc Lynch, author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today, has said, the channel provided "a relentless criticism of the status quo, of political repression, of economic stagnation." It pried the stranglehold on information from the hands of state leaders, and allowed formerly heretical views to enter the living rooms and coffee shops of the Arab public, forcing their politicians to, as Lynch puts it, "at least think about what will play well on Al Jazeera."
By contrast with AJE's bright new premises, the Arabic channel's headquarters are spare – nothing more than a series of high-end trailers with stained industrial carpeting and the scent of coffee laced with cardamom floating through the hallways....
