Al Arabiya<\/a>. Al Arabiya was the station playing on the giant LCD in the lobby. It focuses more on the Gulf, compared to Al Jazeera\u2019s regional agenda which revolves \u2013 not unsurprisingly \u2013 around the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Iraq.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s an agenda that the Middle Eastern journalists I\u2019m meeting say oversimplifies the situation and demonises the US. They\u2019re hardly warm and approving of American foreign policy but they prefer coverage with a little less editorial salt. It\u2019s a view I\u2019ve often heard repeated in the Middle East. Al Jazeera<\/b> certainly isn\u2019t regarded as a pariah, but its opinionated presentation polarises Arab audiences as surely as Fox News<\/b> divides Americans.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d found someone else, probably rather more coherent and less ideologically ambivalent, to fill the chair.<\/p>\n
I was quite looking forward to asking their presenter what they made of their former Baghdad reporter John Cookson<\/b>, joining the AJE crowd\u2026would leaving Fox for Al Jazeera be regarded as treacherous, expedient or a guarantee of quality?<\/p>\n
I remember John for a particularly OTT two-way he did for Sky News<\/b> during the Iraqi elections. Asked by an anchor on auto-pilot about \u2018the mood on the street,\u2019 he inhaled deeply and after a theatrical pause alluded to \u2018the sweet smell of democracy\u2019 wafting through Baghdad. The aroma of cheese made it all the way from the banks of the Tigris to the gates of Osterley\u2026not a clip perhaps that made it onto his Doha showreel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s international profile remains high, its Arabic channel has lost out in its own backyard to Dubai-based channel Al […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,50,81],"tags":[64,139,65,78],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-journalists","category-media","tag-al-jazeera","tag-al-jazeera-english","tag-fox-news","tag-uk-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3270,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/3270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}