The 'Al Jazeera effect'
From the Blog PkColumnist.com: The 'Al Jazeera effect' - Previously known only for harsh censorships, the Middle East is experiencing a media transformation. Today, BBC, CNN, the Chinese CCTV, the Russian RT and the Turkish TRT are all broadcasting in Arabic to win Middle Eastern audiences. Meanwhile, since the 1990s, a host of "privately-run" Arab-owned networks have emerged. However, it is Al Jazeera, often called "the CNN of the Gulf," which is a global success story. Established in 1996, the Qatar-based network soared to international prominence after the Sept 11 incident. This sudden fame stemmed from its bureau in Afghanistan that played a key role in the world's access to Osama bin Laden's speeches, then greatly in demand. This translated into 35 million global viewers for Al Jazeera, including 150,000 in the USA alone. The TV channel had to pay a price for the success. In 2001, US companies like General Motors and Pepsi Cola announced their decision not to advertise on Al Jazeera—a $4.5-million financial loss. But it was the US bombing of Al Jazeera's bureau in Kabul on Nov 13, 2003, that lent the channel an aura of victimhood. The journalists who probed the incident substantiated suspicions that the bombing was a deliberate attempt to silence Al Jazeera's coverage of the US occupation of Afghanistan. The bombing helped improve Al Jazeera's ratings to an extent that Joe Biden, the current US vice president who then headed the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, backed a plan to pump $500 million into an Arabic-language channel to combat what can be called Al Jazeera effect. The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 brought Al Jazeera to the attention of an even larger number of local and international viewers and media experts. Capitalising on this success, Al Jazeera decided to branch into English programming in 2006 and created an English website. Already, the Al Jazeera website in Arabic had proved a great success. It was launched in January 2001, and the 9/11 windfall resulted in Aljazeera.net receiving 38 million visits for by the end of that year. The "Al Jazeera effect" was due in no small part to biased reporting of mainstream US media on Afghanistan and the conduct of some American correspondents in Iraq. In the latter case, reporters Sans Frontieres was horrified at the US media playing the combatant. Executives at CNN, ABC and MSNBC ordered their stringers in Kabul to put a patriotic slant to their coverage of the Afghan war. As for Fox, its Geraldo Rivera got so charged up he told his viewers from Afghanistan that, given the chance, he would personally kill Osama bin Laden. In Iraq, US media patriotism took a truly nasty turn. CNN's "security guards" were reported to have opened fire on Iraqi soldiers. A New York Times correspondent was found directing a squad of US troops to hunt "insurgents," and then participating in their interrogation. It was no surprise, therefore, that a huge audience started tuning to Al Jazeera to hear the "other side of the story" in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Al Jazeera did a remarkable job of exposing the Western media in Iraq. Hence, the Al Jazeera bureau in Baghdad met the fate as its sister bureau in Kabul had suffered . Meanwhile, the United States' Middle Eastern outpost, Israel, bombed Hezbollah's "Al-Manar" TV in Beirut during the 32-day Israeli-Lebanese war of July-August 2006. The three incidents already had a precedent in Belgrade, where Serbian TV was bombed when Empire dispatched its bombers there in 1999. At the same time, there was an infotainment element to Al Jazeera's rise. Sometimes, hysteric participants at its talk shows resorted to fistfights, and this heralded the arrival of a new mediated information era, while it further improved the network's ratings. Previously, state-run television channels in the Gulf would hardly report anything but the daily routines of the monarchs. For the first time, "opposition" was granted access to the TV screen. Subjects considered taboo until then (even minor cases of royal corruption, human rights, jihad) began to be broached on television. Saudi-funded MBC became the trailblazing Arabic channel when it started a bureau in Israel. The Orbit Satellite & Radio Network covering the Middle East and North Africa had already set a precedent in 1996 by interviewing Benyamin Netanyahu. Al Jazeera made it a policy to seek the Israeli version in every clash in Palestine. This led to conspiracy theories that Al Jazeera was backed by the Zionist media machine. Even a US hand was detected, since Qatar hosts a gigantic US military base and is one of the few Arab states that enjoy good relations with Israel, even though it has no diplomatic relations with it. These conspiracy theories, however, were proved false and events in the post-9/11 period proved that Washington or Tel Aviv were not behind Al Jazeera. Soon after the Gulf War of 1991, CNN's coverage of the conflict had alarmed Arab monarchs. So, since state-run channels had lost every shred of credibility, like PTV in Pakistan, Arabic-language "privately owned" channels were rolled out. These channels were funded either by a royal family or a political party ("Al Manar"). It was a top-down attempt at appropriation of oppositional voice. Al Jazeera and other channels take risks of being accused of undermining the legitimacy of the conservative social-political system in the Middle East. But such risks are neutralised through what Todd Gitlin calls everyday working of journalism. According to Gitlin, "large-scale social conflict is imported into the news institution and reproduced there: reproduced, however, in terms derived from the dominant ideology. Discrepant statements about reality are acknowledged—but muffled, softened, blurred, fragmented, domesticated at the same time." Hence, there is hardly a debate on Al Jazeera about monarchies, trade union rights for South Asian labour, juvenile camel-jockeys from Pakistan, sadistic torture of women domestic workers, US bases in the Gulf, the region's economic system, and so on. An Arab joke, a rerun of a Stalin-era Cold War joke, has an Arab journalist meeting a reporter from New York. The American journalist says: "We enjoy complete freedom of expression in the USA. We can even criticise the US president, as much as we like." The Arab journalist replies: "Well, we also have complete freedom of expression here. We can also criticise the US president, as much as we like." . Read Full Post
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