On the day Al Jazeera English launches where better to visit than the offices of a leading Middle East newspaper?

There is a complete absence of excitement at the launch of the new service. Although Al Jazeera’s international profile remains high, its Arabic channel has lost out in its own backyard to Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya. Al Arabiya was the station playing on the giant LCD in the lobby. It focuses more on the Gulf, compared to Al Jazeera’s regional agenda which revolves – not unsurprisingly – around the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Iraq.

It’s an agenda that the Middle Eastern journalists I’m meeting say oversimplifies the situation and demonises the US. They’re hardly warm and approving of American foreign policy but they prefer coverage with a little less editorial salt. It’s a view I’ve often heard repeated in the Middle East. Al Jazeera certainly isn’t regarded as a pariah, but its opinionated presentation polarises Arab audiences as surely as Fox News divides Americans.

Speaking of Fox, overnight I was emailed about doing an interview on their noon show. They wanted to discuss how Al Jazeera English might play in the US, but by the time I hit reply they’d found someone else, probably rather more coherent and less ideologically ambivalent, to fill the chair.

I was quite looking forward to asking their presenter what they made of their former Baghdad reporter John Cookson, joining the AJE crowd…would leaving Fox for Al Jazeera be regarded as treacherous, expedient or a guarantee of quality?

I remember John for a particularly OTT two-way he did for Sky News during the Iraqi elections. Asked by an anchor on auto-pilot about ‘the mood on the street,’ he inhaled deeply and after a theatrical pause alluded to ‘the sweet smell of democracy’ wafting through Baghdad. The aroma of cheese made it all the way from the banks of the Tigris to the gates of Osterley…not a clip perhaps that made it onto his Doha showreel.