TUNE IN around 4 o'clock Eastern and the news is feeding from the London anchor desk. The ticker is crawling: DR Congo Loser to Challenge Results . . . Netherlands Moves to Ban Burqa. Co-anchors Nick Clarke and Barbara Serra, in an urbane British accent that osmoses credibility, lead into the hour's top story: Darfur. Break for commercials. Then back, with a plume of soaring, faintly New Age music that's as clean, familiar, and forgettable as a Marriott lobby. The only thing unfamiliar is the logo in the corner: a glowing golden bulb of flowery Arabic script. Welcome to Al Jazeera English.
If you're in the United States, you can only watch Al Jazeera English on a computer monitor. Cable and satellite providers have been hesitant to carry the channel, so for now it streams from the Internet. Depending on your connection speed, the video may sporadically freeze or pixilate. And then there is the cognitive dissonance.
PLANNED FOR YEARS by its Arabic-language parent as a direct competitor to the likes of CNN International, Al Jazeera English went live on November 15, and, depending on who you ask, either started bringing fresh perspectives to a public fed on developed country-centric news or uncapped a fire hydrant of jihadist propaganda.
The new network's Washington anchor, former Nightline correspondent Dave Marash, urges critics to tune in and judge for themselves. But watching only confuses the matter further.
THERE'S A DISTINCTIVE new-network smell to Al Jazeera English. In the run-up to launch, network executives lined up
big, polished journalism names such as Sir David Frost and Riz Khan. Four anchor desks across the globe--in Washington, London, Doha, and Kuala Lumpur--rotate throughout the broadcast day, each giving their respective regional stories top billing. The plurality of on-air personalities appear to be British.
Advertisers haven't moved in en masse. Most of the break space is filled with house promo spots, where confidant voiceovers promise "direct and fearless journalism" and "every angle, every side" of the story, and that "now with Al Jazeera, ordinary people have a voice."
Aside from a fuzzily Third World orientation, there's nothing contentious about the vast majority of the programming. Live, looping coverage starts with the same top stories playing on most other news nets. Below the top line are stories that AJE's competitors probably wouldn't mention (i.e. election results from Mauritania).
The interview shows do not feature Keffiyehed Islamic scholars calling for a thousand more bin Ladens: The line-up of guests on Riz Khan's One on One, for instance, includes Nobel-winning economists and Bollywood stars. The net effect is less than revolutionary.
If not as joltingly distinct as promised, this is still the face of Al Jazeera that its defenders like to defend. Their line is that the network's Arabic-language parent is a world class press that breaks taboos and represents views of the Arab street; AJE translates those, and other perspectives from the "global south" into the world's lingua franca. The implicit suggestion is that everyone is better off for it.
ON ONE OF THE DAYS I was watching, the London desk had breaking news from Gaza. A hundred-plus Hamas gunmen had formed a human shield around their leader's house to ward off an Israeli air strike. This began a string of short reports on recent events in the Strip: The U.N. Assembly had voted overwhelmingly to condemn Israel; accompanying footage showed Palestinian bodies. The next item was Israel's bombing of a building that housed (AJE authoritatively asserted) a charity. The broadcast made no mention either of what the Israelis believed the building contained or why the Israelis were attacking in Gaza in the first place.
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