Al Jazeera

'Happy Birthday Al Jazeera
By Radio Netherlands. 15 Nov 2007-->

November 15, 2007 marks the first anniversary of the launch of Al Jazeera’s English service. The Qatar-based 24-hour TV news station has quickly built up a good reputation for the quality of its journalism and, according to its Managing Director Nigel Parsons, “proved the sceptics wrong.” Apart from those in the US, that is.
It’s still almost impossible to find Al Jazeera on any of the US cable systems, and that’s a pity because in my opinion it delivers an international news service that is infinitely superior to what’s on offer from the domestic US networks, including Fox News and CNN.
Cable company concerns
Americans are able to view Al Jazeera via its website, and the majority of the comments I’ve seen from those who have done so are in favour of it being shown on TV screens in the US. The problem is that the cable companies are unwilling to sign carriage agreements with Al Jazeera in case this upsets the US government, or harms their business, such as consumers terminating their contracts in protest.
Other Western countries are more relaxed about Al Jazeera. In Britain, which stood shoulder to shoulder with the US over the decision to go into Iraq in 2003, Al Jazeera English has been available on the Sky satellite platform since Day One, and there appears to have been no backlash. On the occasions when I have watched Al Jazeera, it has struck me as a network which strives to cover areas of the world that the US and British networks tend to overlook - large parts of Africa, for example.
Selective snippets
The problem, of course, is that before Al Jazeera English was launched, those outside the Arab World usually only saw snippets of Al Jazeera when it broadcast video messages from Osama bin Laden on its Arabic service. Western TV channels always seized on these broadcasts as major news items, and created the impression that Al Jazeera was just a mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda. They did not report the reactions and analysis to these bin Laden videos within the Arab world, notably on al-Jazeera itself.
There’s an irony about the US attitude to Al Jazeera. On The Nation website, Kristen Gillespie notes that “The headquarters of the channel that has been branded “Terror TV” by some US officials is only half an hour away from one of America’s most important strategic outposts, where tanks and planes damaged in Iraq are repaired and sent back into battle.” Yes, there’s a US airbase in Qatar, even though most American’s aren’t able to watch an English-language TV station from there.'

Lees verder: http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/11/15/happy-birthday-al-jazeera/