{"id":699,"date":"2007-11-13T01:58:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-13T07:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=699"},"modified":"2007-11-13T01:58:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-13T07:58:00","slug":"review-al-jazeera-english-one-year-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/11\/review-al-jazeera-english-one-year-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Al Jazeera English – one year on"},"content":{"rendered":"

H<\/span>ere\u2019s a piece I wrote for Press Gazette<\/a> on Al Jazeera English<\/span>, one year on.<\/p>\n

In the gardens of Versailles you can visit a charming monument to France\u2019s conservative, construction-crazed 18th-century monarchy. It\u2019s the Petit Hameau, an idealised village built at the whim of Marie Antoinette as a way of \u201cconnecting\u201d with the great unwashed. Nicely scrubbed cows chewed the cud on its phoney pastures. The cows managed to avoid the guillotine.<\/p>\n

In the desert city of Doha there\u2019s a rather less charming monument to Qatar\u2019s conservative, construction-crazed monarchy. The studios of Al Jazeera, a little media village built at the whim of the country\u2019s ruler. In place of cows, presenters like Sir David Frost and Rageh Omaar are allowed to chew the fat. But will it save Qatar\u2019s mini-depotism?<\/p>\n

Frost, at least, has demonstrated exactly why the BBC gave him the chop. More people see an actor playing him in the West End than watch him on TV. Omaar has freelanced across other channels, without becoming a recognisable Al Jazeera brand.<\/p>\n

But then presenters rarely do succeed on news channels, unless you look at, say, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, Lou Dobbs on CNN, and Bill O\u2019Reilly on Fox News. So, a year on, is Al Jazeera English anything more than a magnificent billion dollar folly?<\/p>\n

Not if you\u2019re Al Jazeera boss Wadah Khanfar. He calls Al Jazeera English \u201cthe voice of the South.\u201d<\/p>\n

The channel\u2019s tireless MD Nigel Parsons puts it differently. He says it is seen by opinion formers. It is certainly positioned as a channel for elites rather than the oppressed. It is strong on foreign news and politics, and many of its key personnel are steeped in the public service values of British television news.<\/p>\n

First anniversary talk is not about its mission or the stories it has broken, but of carriage \u2013 who is piping or beaming the channel into homes. It looks like AJE will finally get into India \u2013 expect an announcement tied to the birthday on 15 November, but it will face tough competition from a boisterous market crowded with home-grown news channels.<\/p>\n

But in the world\u2019s two biggest English-speaking markets, Britain and the USA, AJE has barely registered among viewers, and in the US it is still struggling to be seen at all.<\/p>\n

A hundred million people now have the opportunity of watching it, but that\u2019s far from the numbers actually tuning in. Putting any credible figure to viewers is all but impossible \u2013 in the Middle East itself, the lack of an accurate ratings system has long held back the development of an effective advertising market. But you have to be careful when it comes to asking people what they really want.<\/p>\n

For anyone like me, who\u2019s spent their life working in television journalism, it\u2019s hard not to see any investment in the medium as reason for celebration, euphoria even. Admittedly, investment is normally a word preceded by the words \u2018return\u2019 and \u2018on\u2019. <\/p>\n

By his own reckoning, it took Ted Turner five years to make CNN profitable. Qatar National Bank, the station\u2019s current backer, must be taking a pretty long view. Will Al Jazeera English ever make money? My kids might find out.<\/p>\n

But the euphoria that greeted that investment comes with a bonus that might interest Qatar\u2019s ruler, and it\u2019s a bonus that begins paying back right from day one \u2013 silence.<\/p>\n

And the silence comes easy, because Al Jazeera English looks and sounds slick and professional. It covers stories others ignore, and shines a light on corners of the world most television news outfits are content to leave unlit. Friends and former colleagues \u2013 talented and able individuals \u2013 have found work there. Why rock the boat?<\/p>\n

But the silence is wrong, because Qatar is a micro-state where, by popular consent, there is no popular consent. Only a quarter of its 800,000 inhabitants have citizenship. Elections promised for this year have yet to materialise. No one\u2019s likely to be standing on a platform of confiscating royal assets.<\/p>\n

This is the US State Department\u2019s latest assessment of press freedom in Qatar. It\u2019s worth quoting at length:<\/p>\n

\u201cJournalists continued to self-censor due to social and political pressures when reporting on government policies, the ruling family, and relations with neighbouring states. There were reports that security authorities threatened both individuals and organisations against publishing undesirable articles.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough citizens expressed many of their views freely and in public, they avoided discussing sensitive political and religious issues. The much larger foreign population did not express itself as freely or as publicly.<\/p>\n

\u201cAl Jazeera and the government both claimed the channel to be independent and free of government influence, but it was government subsidised and avoided critical commentary of government policies. On domestic issues, Al Jazeera covered local news generally only if there was an international angle to it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That is the silence. So what, you might say? Isn\u2019t it enough that the station is a force for change? Isn\u2019t being \u2018the voice of the South\u2019 sufficient? And there\u2019s the rub.<\/p>\n

Television traditionally has had to come to many accommodations to stay in business. CNN found that out in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Is the silence about Qatar just one of those pragmatic arrangements that are outweighed by the benefits of simply broadcasting? I wish I thought the answer was yes.<\/p>\n

But you can\u2019t export values you\u2019re unwilling to adopt in your own backyard. We don\u2019t always live up to our own standards in British and American TV journalism, but the only thing stopping us is ourselves, not the fear of offending a regime whose caprices we can only second guess.<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera English needs to cause trouble in the kingdom it calls home if it really wants to be thought of as something more than a very expensive attempt to buy silence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a piece I wrote for Press Gazette on Al Jazeera English, one year on. In the gardens of Versailles you can visit a charming monument to France\u2019s conservative, construction-crazed 18th-century monarchy. It\u2019s the Petit Hameau, an idealised village built at the whim of Marie Antoinette as a way of \u201cconnecting\u201d with the great unwashed. […]<\/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],"tags":[64,139,39,65],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-al-jazeera","tag-al-jazeera-english","tag-cnn","tag-fox-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","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=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}