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It wasn't just their fellow broadcasters who were keeping a close eye on Al-Jazeera; Washington had been paying attention too. Secretary of State Colin Powell met Oct. 3 with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, and asked him to "restrain" Al-Jazeera, citing specifically the channel's rebroadcast of the 1998 bin Laden interview and charging that it invited anti-American guests, who point to U.S. foreign policy as being behind the Sept. 11 attacks, to appear on its talk shows. While Powell himself was interviewed—as was Tony Blair in London—most officials in Washington made it a policy not to talk to Al-Jazeera. "I was begging them," Washington bureau chief Hafez Al-Mirazi told the Washington Post.

But the West "is trying to shoot the messenger," says Yosri Fouda, investigative correspondent and deputy executive director of Al-Jazeera's London bureau. "If bin Laden is going to send a tape, who will he send it to? To CNN, who he probably considers a representative of 'the enemy'? No. To an Arab government channel? No, because there's just as much animosity there. We're relaying valuable information that the West doesn't have, and we'll do that as long as everything is verified and as long as time and space are given for different viewpoints."

Organizations like Journalists sans Frontieres and the Committee to Protect Journalists lodged complaints about the statements coming out of Washington. "Arab government attempts to influence Al-Jazeera have garnered widespread attention over the years. We are disheartened to see U.S. officials adopting similar tactics," said CPJ executive director Ann Cooper. By mid-month those tactics had changed, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice had both given exclusive interviews to Al-Jazeera. A public relations campaign led by the newly appointed undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, ad executive Charlotte Beers, is considering buying airtime on the channel in an attempt to win over Arab and Muslim opinion.

The controversy over how Al-Jazeera covered the news was itself news. Fouda appeared in a live debate on the BBC about Al-Jazeera and its coverage; simultaneously, CNN had its own discussion of the same topic as part of its special program "International Correspondents" (on which Fouda had appeared a week earlier). The CNN host marveled that here he had an Arab and an Israeli—Al-Quds editor-in-chief Abdul Bari Atwan and Haaretz correspondent Sharon Sadeh—agreeing that Al-Jazeera should be free to make its own news judgments.

Even more significant than these invitations to take part in other's debates is the fact that Al-Jazeera—well known for its live, call-in political talk shows—turned the spotlight of analysis on itself. On Oct. 15 Al-Jazeera's Sami Haddad in London hosted an episode of the debate show "More Than One Opinion" devoted to discussion of media coverage of the current crisis and its role in shaping public opinion, with political writer and journalist Sami Zubian, Leslie McLoughlin of the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, and journalist and American affairs specialist Reda Hilal. The debate turned to Al-Jazeera and its role in covering the crisis; the guests, as have others, criticized the channel for its lack of critical reporting on its home state of Qatar and, more immediately relevant, for using phrasings such as "what the US calls terrorism" in its coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Despite the flurry of attention Al-Jazeera is now receiving from the West, this is far from the first time the channel has made headlines or drawn critics. Al-Jazeera was in Baghdad covering the 1998 US-led Desert Fox operation; then, as now, Arab viewers turned to them for information and foreign channels turned to them for material. During the last Israeli elections, Al-Jazeera interviewed Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres—the first time an Arab news channel has interviewed Israeli leaders—and drew tremendous fire from across the Arab world.

Al-Jazeera chairman Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani told TBS that "Al-Jazeera was accused in the beginning of being a channel financed by Iraq or by Saddam Hussein when we covered events in Iraq. When we reported on the Israeli elections and when we ran interviews with Barak and Peres, Al-Jazeera was immediately accused of being financed by the Mossad. When we reported on events or issues within the United States from our office in Washington we were accused of being financed by the CIA. We're now hearing remarks from the American administration on our coverage of recent events, and I think we're evenhanded in our reporting on these events."

The accusations are a concern, says chief editor Ibrahim Helal. "We have to be fully aware of what we're doing when we're under this type of accusation. Even a normal, small technical mistake that could happen anywhere can be misunderstood. You feel under close monitoring. But I think the conflicting accusations are good. We brought the tapes of our interviews with Barak and others out of the library to show them to visiting journalists, and point out to them that we were accused at the time of being an Israeli channel. How can we be accused of supporting Israeli and bin Laden at the same time?"

And, says Mr. Al-Ali, the fact that Al-Jazeera has aired video sent from Al-Qaeda as Washington protested and the American networks, following a meeting with Condoleeza Rice, chose not to run the tapes, doesn't mean the channel takes the matter lightly. "We do worry about this. We don't just take any tape that comes to our offices or to the station and put it on air. Before that we have a meeting to discuss how we should treat the news, and not be subject to the propaganda from a party or organization or group, Osama bin Laden or others. When we aired the tape of Osama bin Laden spokesman Suliman Abu Geith, directly after that we brought Edward Walker, former US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, for his comments, and after that a Muslim cleric to talk from an Islamic perspective about Osama bin Laden's statements, to raise points such as that Islam doesn't allow you to kill innocent people, that bin Laden will condemn American bombings but at the same time give orders to kill innocent Americans. To air the statements without any comments, without any opposing statements or viewpoints or analysis, that's when it's propaganda." continued

Next page: From regional powerhouse to global broadcaster
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continued:

The Courting of Al-Jazeera

by Sarah Sullivan