I wrote an anniversary review of Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish recently, point­ing out the dilemma of run­ning a glob­ally “progressive-minded” news chan­nel on behalf of a des­potic régime.

Here is an email exchange with someone at Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish in Doha, respond­ing to that piece:

…I am a tad dis­ap­poin­ted with your recent Press Gaz­ette art­icle on ‘Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish — 1 year on.’

“An expens­ive attempt to buy silence”? Check your facts. [Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish has] repor­ted on stor­ies unflat­ter­ing to the Qatari régime — the plight of abused domestic work­ers, and the level of human traf­fick­ing to name but two … Al Jaz­eera Arabic has done an entire pro­gramme ques­tion­ing Qatar’s régime for allow­ing a US Army base on its ter­rit­ory, com­plete with phone-ins. I can safely say no journ­al­ist involved was imprisoned/deported/beheaded as a result.

You go so far as to quote the US State Depart­ment: “On domestic issues, Al Jaz­eera covered local news gen­er­ally only if there was an inter­na­tional angle to it.” Yes? And? Al Jaz­eera only cov­ers MOST stor­ies if there’s an inter­na­tional angle to them. It’s also ques­tion­able to quote the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, given their top man actu­ally con­sidered bomb­ing Al Jaz­eera Arabic. Press free­dom indeed.

So what stor­ies do you think we’ve missed? Send us a list — the plan­ning depart­ment is always glad of edit­or­ial suggestions.

My reply: Hmmm. I guess I’ll have to wait for the invest­ig­a­tions into how the al-Thanis make and spend their money — would AJE ever go near the Qatari royal fam­ily? Or another Gulf royal fam­ily? The BAe investigations?

There are a few story ideas in the (partly state-sponsored) human rights review quoted here.

Self-censorship is a cri­ti­cism I’ve heard from people in Qatar, and in the Arab media gen­er­ally (and about the Arab media generally).

I don’t hold a torch for the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, but when Qataris vote the al-Thanis out, or impeach them, or their term of office expires — let me know.

There is a fun­da­mental dilemma in a “pro­gress­ive” TV sta­tion fun­ded by a des­potic régime (even an enlightened des­pot­ism). I don’t think it’s wrong to point that out.

And I don’t think the cov­er­age you men­tion (some of which oth­ers had also told me of) in any way redresses that bal­ance or answers that fun­da­mental ques­tion — for me. You obvi­ously feel dif­fer­ently.

Yes, Qatar is a non-democratic régime. Yes, there are aspects of civil infringe­ments here that right-minded people like you or I deplore — not being able to leave the coun­try without offi­cial per­mis­sion, for instance. But the point is, Qatar’s lead­er­ship is essen­tially a benign régime, and the issues here are simply not as grip­ping as what’s hap­pen­ing in Pakistan, Myan­mar, Geor­gia, Mogadishu, Sudan, etc etc.

If we were called Doha Today I could under­stand your beef — but we’re not. We’re a global news organ­isa­tion. And let’s face it, all news organ­isa­tions oper­ate edit­or­ial judge­ments when it comes to select­ing which stor­ies to broad­cast… the duller stuff doesn’t make it. That’s not spe­cial to Al Jaz­eera. How many Qatar stor­ies have you seen on BBC World or CNN? Exactly.

We’ve done ster­ling work upset­ting lots of regimes — oper­at­ing under­cover in Myan­mar, for instance.

And we don’t shy away from polit­ical stor­ies involving this region. We’ve done the BAe story. We’ve ques­tioned the point of the GCC, and the effic­acy (or lack of) of the Arab League. And we’ve covered the grass-roots cam­paign for demo­cratic reform across the Gulf — I did that one, so I can assure you they got good airtime.

Would we ever be stopped from invest­ig­at­ing the Al Thanis? I’m not say­ing it couldn’t hap­pen. If a big juicy royal scan­dal erup­ted on our door­step, would we be pre­ven­ted from report­ing it? Or pressed into report­ing it a cer­tain way? Maybe, who knows? And if we are, I prom­ise you I will be straight on the phone to you. But I can say unequi­voc­ally that hasn’t happened so far…