Even for a news organisation that frequently makes the headlines itself, last year was a rollercoaster ride for the Al-Jazeera satellite television station. The big question for 2004 is whether, in the fallout from the Iraq war, it will buckle under pressure to tone down what critics say is its remorselessly anti-US output.
With tens of millions of regular viewers in the Arab world, the Qatar-based station has revolutionised journalism in the middle east. Yet its launch in 1996 happened almost by accident, the result of a terminated contract between Orbit radio and television service, funded by Saudi Arabia's ruling family, and the BBC's Arabic Television venture. In the 1990s the al-Saud family bought up almost the entire Arabic-language media in both the west and the middle east and signed a deal with the BBC to broadcast its channel. But it was discomforted by the editorial independence shown by the BBC, the like of which the Arab world had not witnessed before. The final straw was a documentary the channel broadcast about public beheadings in Saudi Arabia. Only 20 months after signing the deal, the Saudis pulled out of the joint venture.
At just that time, the emir of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, was setting up Al-Jazeera. He originally envisaged it as a means of enhancing the international reputation of his country, which even most other Arabs considered an irrelevance. Al-Jazeera was quietly able to recruit most of the BBC-trained Arab journalists who had been left jobless after the collapse of the Saudi venture. It inherited not only the staff of the former BBC network but also its style, content and free spirit.
Most of Al-Jazeera's coverage consists of news reports of the kind familiar to viewers of CNN and BBC World, and international issues are dealt with thoroughly and for the most part objectively. In fact, the regular news bulletins throughout the day and night consist of little more than a digest of the latest reports from western news organisations translated into Arabic. But Al-Jazeera has distinguished itself with its often graphic reports from war-torn countries in the region and the regular airing of exclusive videotapes from Osama bin Laden. And its controversial talk shows have a loyal and very large following. The most famous is The Opposite Direction, hosted by Faisal al-Qassim, a Syrian who is now a household name in the middle east. According to often quoted but unreliable figures, he attracts a weekly audience of some 30m. The guests for his 75-minute show are typically from opposite ends of the political spectrum and often end up on the verge of a fight, if one of them has not already stormed off the set. In one recent talk show, broadcast from London, the gulf between the debaters - which included LSE academic Fred Halliday (speaking in Arabic) and Abd al-Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabie - was so wide, and the bias of the presenter Sami Haddad so clear, that it made for a highly emotional but not very productive discussion.
Al-Jazeera was supposed to be making a profit by the end of 2001, but despite its popularity it still makes a loss. Qatar's ruling family put up an initial $140m as a five-year loan and its annual stipend is now said to be $100m. The station's continuing losses are largely the result of very low advertising revenue. Companies in the Gulf are reluctant to advertise for fear of upsetting their host governments. Saudi control of most of the advertising agencies in the region also creates problems. Indeed, the Gulf Co-operation Council - comprising all Gulf countries except Yemen - called for a blanket boycott by advertisers in October 2002 in retaliation for Al-Jazeera's coverage of their domestic politics.
Is it too extreme?
While the station has consolidated its position as the premier news outlet in the middle east, it has also been shaken periodically by accusations regarding the views of its editors and correspondents. Last year, that slow trickle of accusations turned into a flood.
In May 2003, the director general of Al-Jazeera, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, who had held the top job at the station since it was launched, was sacked amid allegations that he had worked with Saddam Hussein's intelligence services. Ali visited Iraq shortly before the US-led war and had an hour-long interview with Saddam. Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), has accused several Al-Jazeera journalists of working for Iraqi agencies, citing documents found in state archives in Baghdad. Al-Jazeera certainly enjoyed a special status in pre-war Iraq, being allowed to work independently of the ministry of information, which strictly controlled all other foreign media.
In September, the station's best-known Arab correspondent, Tayssir Alouni, who had reported from Afghanistan during the US war against the Taleban in 2001, was arrested in Spain. He was alleged to be a member of a Syrian-dominated cell of al Qaeda and to have close links with those responsible for the 11th September attacks. In 1998, Alouni allegedly allowed Mohammed Baiah, a suspected al Qaeda courier, to use his address near Granada to renew his immigration status fraudulently. During subsequent trips to Afghanistan, Alouni himself is accused of acting as a courier for the cell.
Also in September, the US-approved Iraqi governing council in Baghdad banned Al-Jazeera's Baghdad reporters from government offices and news conferences for two weeks, along with those of a rival station, Dubai-based Al-Arabiya, after both aired calls for suicide attacks within Iraq by what they usually refer to as "resistance groups." Then, in October, US forces detained two Al-Jazeera reporters covering a car bombing at a police station in Baghdad. They were not unreasonably suspected of having had prior knowledge of the attack, because they had arrived at the scene and started to film before the bomb went off. In January it was the turn of Faisal al-Qassim himself to make the headlines. A front-page article in the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat reported that documents discovered in Baghdad showed that al-Qassim had met privately twice with members of Iraq's secret police before the war on Iraq.
Will it bend to pressure?
Editors at Al-Jazeera's website, one of the ten most popular on the internet, meanwhile quietly bowed to pressure from the Bush administration in September by removing two cartoons deemed "inflammatory." According to a senior Al-Jazeera editor, this took place on the same day that a US official called the station to complain. One of the cartoons showed so-called "green-card soldiers": young Latino men shown entering an immigration tunnel to emerge from the other side as US soldiers, ready to leave for Iraq. The other was of the twin towers imploding, and two giant fuel pumps rising from the ashes to replace them.
"We ran a story about the American 'green-card' soldiers and it caused a lot of fuss among the US officials in Iraq," the website's managing editor, Ahmed al-Sheikh, said at the time; Al-Jazeera itself has not commented on the removal of the cartoons. But just before the decision to pull them was taken, an article appeared in a respected Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Siyasa, which quoted a US diplomat as saying congress had secretly recommended President Bush "put all possible pressure" on the Qatari government to shut down the satellite station. The report sent shockwaves through Al-Jazeera.
According to the article, a series of meetings were held at the headquarters of the security intelligence committee of the House of Representatives in late August and early September 2003. The subject was "US-Qatari relations in light of the role Al-Jazeera has played in inciting anti-US sentiment." The US diplomat said that the meetings of key members of the House of Representatives, Senate, Pentagon, state department, CIA and FBI had reached a unanimous proposal on the second anniversary of the 11th September attacks: to advise Bush to warn the Qatari government to close Al-Jazeera - or, as a first step, to replace its current journalists with others who are "moderate and neutral." If Al-Jazeera failed to reconsider its output, the committee was said to have concluded, the US would in turn have to reconsider its relations with Qatar, despite the latter's crucial aid in the war on Iraq.
The Al-Siyasa article claimed that committee members had accused Al-Jazeera of being hostile to US interests and its armed forces, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan; of having become a platform for al Qaeda and the ousted Iraqi regime; and of promoting other "fundamentalist and terrorist" Islamist groups. Their proposals to Bush, according to the article, included transferring its largest military base in the region to another Gulf state; minimising its civilian presence; revoking the defence pact between the US and Qatar; and withdrawing most other US support. (Keeping up the pressure, US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in November that Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were "propaganda outlets" perpetuating "poison and lies" about the US.)
Sheikh Hamad, the emir of Qatar, who continues to bankroll the station, is likely to stay just on the right side of the Americans. With a native Qatari Arab population of under 200,000, Qatar has long been the butt of jokes from other Gulf Arabs. But Al-Jazeera has given Qataris the means of revenge against anyone who now treats them as if they were mere "bedouins with oil."
But no one really knows for sure what is going on in the mind of Sheikh Hamad, a man who deposed his own father to become emir in 1995. It seems obvious that the success of Al-Jazeera has taken him by surprise as much as it has everyone else. There is no evidence that he personally sympathises with the often extreme opinions broadcast. Indeed, his close co-operation with Washington during the war on Iraq would suggest the opposite. Whenever questions are raised about Al-Jazeera's content, the Qatari government merely replies that it is editorially independent. This is not entirely disingenuous - the sheikh has already ended many restrictions on freedom of expression by abolishing Qatar's ministry of information, which in every other Arab country has as its chief role censoring the local media. But the fact remains that Al-Jazeera is financed by the government, and the station noticeably refrains from any direct criticism of it.
Calls from Washington for Al-Jazeera to tone down its criticism of the US are not new. In 2001, Sheikh Hamad confirmed, after a meeting with Colin Powell in Washington, that he had been asked to exert influence on the channel. And the station had already proved that it was susceptible to criticism from less powerful governments, especially from within the Arab world. In 1999, for example, it suspended the host of a show that the Kuwaiti government had complained "insulted the symbol of Kuwait," Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah. A caller had accused him of treachery for allowing US troops to be stationed in that Islamic country. When the show was repeated, the remarks were censored. The journalists at the station, who are mostly western-educated, were said to be furious.
But Sheikh Hamad would do well to study the experience of his giant neighbour, Saudi Arabia. It took the al-Saud ruling family seven decades to face up to the consequences of having aligned itself domestically with a jihad-inspired religious establishment while at the same time aligning itself internationally with the west and in particular the US. One result of that contradiction was 11th September, an attack on the Saudi-American alliance in which 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudi nationals. Qatar, at least, seems to have taken only a few months to wake up to the absurdity of bankrolling an anti-US, pan-Arab satellite news station while also benefiting massively in economic terms from allowing the US-led war on Iraq to be co-ordinated from a US airbase on its soil.
Whether or not Al-Jazeera can manage to distance itself from the government of Qatar - financially as well as editorially - will determine the network's long-term viability. In the meantime, the challenge for Sheikh Hamad is how to climb down in the face of US pressure while not losing face in front of resentful Arab neighbours, who would be happy to witness his humiliation.
The English website
Al-Jazeera's English-language website, re-launched in September after being brought down by an American hacker at the height of the invasion of Iraq, was also in turmoil at the end of last year. It dumped its star western reporter, Yvonne Ridley, in November, apparently because she refused to adhere to what increasingly appears to be a policy of toning down anti-US sentiment. The editors were inundated by almost a million emails protesting against the decision, especially from Muslim groups, but also from British MPs George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn, and members of the House of Lords.
Ridley is said to be the seventh western journalist to have left, or been forced out, of the English website. As an Express reporter, she rose to fame in 2001, shortly before the US bombing campaign against Afghanistan, after sneaking into the country on a donkey, disguised as an Afghan woman. Imprisoned by the Taleban, she became front-page news around the world. In her book about the adventure, In the Hands of the Taliban, Ridley claimed that the CIA leaked false documents to the Taleban "proving" she was a Mossad spy. The CIA had hoped, Ridley argued, that their contents would persuade her captors to execute her, giving the pro-war lobby in the west a powerful symbol of Taleban barbarity on the eve of the US campaign. However, Ridley claimed that the Taleban saw through the plot, and released her. Although Ridley had little sympathy for her captors, she decided to study Islam, and converted a year after her release.
After joining Al-Jazeera last summer, Ridley began attacking the justification for a war in Iraq, and seemed exactly the kind of journalist Al-Jazeera needed - sympathetic with the Muslim world, but also a lifelong peace campaigner in the west. Her independent streak, however, quickly became a thorn in Al-Jazeera's side. When I visited the Qatar newsroom, she told me that she set up the first branch of the National Union of Journalists in the middle east and set out to challenge what she saw as exploitative working conditions and nepotism in the Al-Jazeera newsroom.
Ridley was launching the kind of campaign against Al-Jazeera from within its ranks which the television station itself had repeatedly launched against corrupt Arab governments. Perhaps more crucially, there were also a number of public arguments between Ridley and senior managers over the English-language website's politics. "She was furious that we were taming our website's content to pacify US critics," as one Al-Jazeera insider put it. The website is now mainly producing summaries of stories from the western newswires - an irony not lost on those whose ideal in founding it was to provide an alternative news source to those already available in the English-speaking world. The botched launch of the website bodes ill for the launch of an English-language version of the satellite television station, tentatively scheduled for the end of May 2004.
Mixed signals from the west
Al-Jazeera's supporters believe that there is a US-inspired campaign of violence against the station. In evidence, they cite the destruction of Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul by a US missile in 2001, shortly after the station had criticised the US attack on Afghanistan. In April last year, American bombs destroyed its offices in Baghdad, killing a senior reporter. The assault on the Baghdad bureau similarly occurred after the network had screened footage of the US bombing of civilian targets in the city.
As America embarks on its "greater middle east initiative" - a campaign promoting democracy and free speech in the region - such incidents are doing little to enhance its reputation, especially when many Arabs believe the US is out to undermine any kind of democratic expression that challenges it. In February, the US administration launched Al-Hurra ("the free one"), a satellite station broadcasting from Washington with facilities in several capitals. Intended as a counterweight to Al-Jazeera, it met with a storm of condemnation from Arab commentators. A leading Saudi cleric, Sheikh Ibrahim bin Nasser al-Khudeiri, a judge at the grand Islamic court in Riyadh, even issued a religious edict forbidding Muslims to watch it.
There was also a storm of controversy in August over allegations that the US had interfered in the issuing of religious edicts by al-Azhar in Cairo, Islam's foremost Sunni authority. Al-Azhar's grand imam, Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, annulled an edict issued by a less senior imam, which called for Arab states to boycott the Iraqi governing council. Reporting an "internal al-Azhar crisis," the London-based pan-Arab Al-Hayat daily claimed Tantawi had issued his statement after a meeting with the US ambassador to Egypt, David Welch. The Egyptian media, including the Al-Arabie newspaper, subsequently launched a campaign to have Welch expelled from the country.
The Arab media are certainly getting mixed signals from the west. After decades of being urged to accommodate opposing views, they are now being pilloried for doing just that. Wadah Khanfar, the managing director of Al-Jazeera, told the World Electronic Media Forum in Geneva last December that his channel had been the first pan-Arab television broadcaster to give a platform to opposition voices, and to provoke discussion on controversial issues. "We can understand the hostility of dictatorial Arab regimes," he said, alluding to the fact that the station is regularly banned from reporting from countries throughout the middle east. "But now the US criticism is harsher... We thought we applied the same international rules of objectivity, balance and expressing all viewpoints."
Whether or not Al-Jazeera does apply international journalistic standards across the board is at the heart of the debate about its content. It has undeniably challenged Arab opinion on previously taboo subjects, such as sex and government corruption. It has given generous airtime to radical Islamists, whose extreme views - usually centered on calls for the overthrow of all Arab regimes - would otherwise be confined to specialist websites (themselves usually blocked in middle eastern countries). A measure of its success is the number of Arab governments which have banned or arrested its reporters (they include Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Sudan and Algeria); Qatari officials have so far received more than 450 official complaints about Al-Jazeera at the diplomatic level. The Saudi government once banned coffee shops in Riyadh from tuning their television sets to the station. And in 1999, in one of the most extraordinary acts of censorship ever, the Algerian government cut the power supply to several major cities, including the capital Algiers, to prevent Algerians from watching an Al-Jazeera debate on the civil war that has waged there since 1992.
However, Al-Jazeera's critics argue that it also shamelessly panders to popular Arab sentiment, giving viewers a steady diet of what they want to see and hear - from highly emotional images of the Palestinian uprising to guests on discussion programmes espousing the most absurd of the latest anti-US conspiracy theories. "We are not there to satisfy Washington or Baghdad or London. Our commitment is to our audience," said Jihad Ali Ballout, a spokesman for the network, during the war. But as Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has put it: "Al-Jazeera has a big problem with objectivity... They are being led by the masses, they don't lead the masses. They know the taste of the Arab street, and the Arab street is anti-American."
Critics argue that Al-Jazeera's journalists are incapable of balanced reporting. One prominent London-based Arab journalist with inside knowledge of the newsroom said: "It's well known that most of the journalists are either radical Islamists or Arab nationalists." Munir al-Mawari, a US journalist born in Yemen who worked for Al-Jazeera in 2000, agrees with that judgement adding that its journalists were either nationalists or "fundamentalists." It is true that Arab journalists are often highly politicised. Before the Iraq war, for example, dozens of local journalists took over one of Amman's main streets in a demonstration organised by the Jordanian Press Association. "America is the enemy of God," yelled one of the men who walked, arm in arm, in a line that spanned the street. "With our blood we defend you Baghdad," they chanted.
Al-Jazeera reflects this basic lack of objectivity among Arab journalists. What remains to be seen is whether the fear of losing their jobs again - US pressure could eventually lead Sheikh Hamad to close the station, or at least replace its current staff - will persuade the reporters to compromise on their views. One British minister who was recently in Qatar and interviewed by Al-Jazeera said he thought he detected a more balanced tone emerging.
Creating a new Arab consciousness
In an article in the Washington Post published shortly after the war began, Mamoun Fandy, the Egyptian-American writer, argued that Americans were always portrayed on Arab television as barbaric, while Arabs were always heroic. Fandy wrote: "The Arab world has experienced that before. In 1967, Egyptian reporter Ahmed Said announced that Arab guns were bringing Israeli planes down like flies. A week later Arabs woke up to the fact that their armies had been roundly defeated. With that, the Arab media lost credibility and audiences turned to foreign stations. It took 25 years for the Arab media to regain some credibility. Their coverage of this war could well cause them to lose it again."
Fandy quoted an Arab journalist who said that dissenting from the anti-US agenda would mean putting his job - and perhaps even his life - on the line. The newspaper for which Fandy writes a column, Asharq al-Awsat (one of three pan-Arab dailies published from London), illustrates the high price any Arabic-language news organisation and its journalists has to pay if it challenges prevailing Arab sentiment. The editor in chief, Abdul Rahman al-Rashid, took a consistently pro-US, anti-Saddam stance from the outset of the war. The newspaper's news coverage generally followed his lead. Asharq al-Awsat correspondents in Amman and Damascus complained that, as a result, other Arab journalists treated them as pariahs. The newspaper's sales plummeted, even in Saudi Arabia (it is funded by the al-Saud family). Newspaper vendors in Jeddah told me that they were lucky on some days to sell even a single copy. Al-Rashid has subsequently "resigned" as editor in chief.
If Asharq al-Awsat represented one extreme of the Arab media during the war on Iraq, Al-Jazeera was typical of the other, more crowded, end of the spectrum. The station repeatedly aired calls for jihad to defend Baghdad, and by implication the "Islamic nation," without pointing out that the Ba'athist regime had always been avowedly secular. Heroic Iraqi resistance was promised, although it was clear to most commentators that the Iraqi army leadership had been bought off long before the first missile was fired. Saddam's support for the Palestinians was portrayed as defiance of the imperialistic US, rather than the crude opportunism of a dictator who had killed more of his own people than Israel has killed Palestinians in 50 years of occupation.
Fandy's prediction - that the Arab media's coverage of the war could cause it to lose its credibility - proved prescient. Saddam's regime quickly fell, and pride was replaced by humiliation. Al-Jazeera and Asharq al-Awsat may represent two extremes but none of the vast array of publications produced in every capital in the middle east has succeeded in filling the wide area of middle ground with healthy disagreement and debate. From Rabat to Cairo, Damascus to Sanaa, the region's newspapers have been filled with almost identical repetitions of the anti-US theme, their shocking images and sensational quotes modelled on the station everyone was glued to during the war: Al-Jazeera.
One reason the new Dubai-based Al-Arabiya station, launched just before the war on Iraq, is increasingly popular among those who would normally have tuned into Al-Jazeera is that it devotes much more of its airtime to documentaries, often produced for western media outlets but dubbed into Arabic. Al-Jazeera, by contrast, is "the CNN of the middle east," and on a hot news day, everyone in every coffee shop in the Arab world seems to be watching it. On a slow day, its routine news broadcasts are listened to passively amid the hustle and bustle of ordering drinks, heated arguments and games of backgammon.
But Al-Jazeera is credited with playing a major role in mobilising support for the Palestinians and helping sustain their current uprising against Israeli occupation. Many Arab governments accused it of instigating the massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations that broke out throughout the middle east in late 2000. Images of Palestinian suffering, rarely given graphic representation in the western media, were initially broadcast live around the clock.
Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskander, authors of Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism, go as far as to argue that, through such coverage, Al-Jazeera has "united Arabs behind a single issue for the first time since the early 1970s, when Um Kalthoum, the legendary Egyptian diva... rallied the Arab world with her stirring monthly radio concerts." The station has certainly played an important role in creating a new pan-Arab radicalism, and the main vehicle has undoubtedly been the Palestinian cause. The station's viewers now form a majority in the Arab world: one report, quoted by Nawawy and Iskander, suggested that 70 per cent rely on the station as their main source for news.
Its coverage of the Palestinian issue goes to the heart of what Al-Jazeera is about, and best explains its ambiguous role in middle eastern politics. Arab reactions to the intifada and their earlier reactions to Um Kalthoum were both based on pure emotion. By emotionally charging the issue - always referring to suicide bombings against Israeli civilians as "martyrdom operations," for instance - the station is unwittingly supporting Arab regimes. It is doing this even more effectively than the government-appointed editors in chief across the region, who for decades have deflected public opinion from domestic issues by using the safety valve of the Palestinian issue. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has contributed significantly to the democratic deficit in the middle east by providing Arab governments with an excuse to divert resources to military spending. In a region where press freedom is all but non-existent, Al-Jazeera is a big step forward for free journalism. However, its lack of objective analysis and unrelenting emotionalism when it comes to the defining issue of the region, make it complicit in the grand deception that has cost the Arabs dear in terms of both freedom and development.
