Al Jazeera English
By David Marash Posted Jan 1 2007
Pope John Paul used to say, “The Church has a preference for the poor.” The new global news channel Al Jazeera has a preference for what is usually referred to as “the South.” A generation or less ago, it was less politely known as “the developing world.” The news channel competitors of Al Jazeera focus 80 percent of their news-gathering focus and resources in North America, and Western Europe; Al Jazeera English (AJE) has its reporters, camera crews and producers, and the front-burners of its brain, invested everywhere else: Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia.
The Pope considered himself head of the Church Universal, and Al Jazeera English also aspires to cover the world and inform all its inhabitants. But just as the Pontiff saw both a special need and a holy mission in serving the poor, AJE pays first attention to the people usually left at the dripping tap end of the information pipeline. And the aim of AJE is not just to provide our “Southern” audiences with better information, but with verification that what happens to them matters, and what they and their “experts” think can be of as much significance as the familiar ideas from Washington, New York, London and Moscow.
For me, as Washington anchor (with Ghida Fakhry) of AJE, the single most interesting part of this journalistic adventure is our projected audience.
According to our marketing and distribution professionals, 80 percent of those who tune us in, out of a potential audience of 88 million. All of them, (alas, currently outside North America), speak English as a second language. Secondary characteristics? Curiosity, courage, education, a preference for empirical evidence rather than traditional or hierarchical authority, a belief that knowledge and good information matter. In short, our audience is about as empowering as possible for high quality news, which is emphatically what Al Jazeera English aspires to be all about.
What defines high quality news? The most transparent, most accurate, most usefully focused representation of reality. This takes time. The point of a news story is to be both new, or at least “up to the minute,” and comprehensible. In the 100 to 150 seconds that define most conventional television news reports, it is hard to communicate what’s new or why things are stuck at the “up to the” minute. Almost never is it possible to add enough context to “the latest news” to make it understandable. But the point of second-language acquisition is understanding: understanding words, understanding social practice and culture. So, our audience wants news coverage comprehensive enough to be usefully understood. And because there is for most second-language speakers a slight pause, for not quite instantaneous translation, the slightly slower speed implicit in slightly longer reports, interviews and discussions makes perfect sense. For me, this means that in almost every half-hour of news, at least one or two stories will be given 5, 6, 7 minutes or more (of linked reports, interviews or discussions), enough time to convey foreground, background and more. But unlike, say, The Newshour on PBS, which often follows a similar pace, our broadcasts are filled with eyes-on reporting from around the world. The resources at PBS permit a little travel by a small staff of correspondents, and some commissioned pieces, but AJE has dozens of bureaus, hundreds of journalists filing almost every day, and both news and video resources from Reuters, APTN and NBC News, in addition to program time in the studio to speak with pundits and players about what is being reported.
The structure of Al Jazeera English starts with four news centers: Doha, Qatar; London, Washington and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Doha is the home office, and it is where, eventually, 12 hours of programming out of every 24 will originate. The other 3 bases will do 4 hours each, and the North/South scoreboard, 8 hours London and Washington, 16 hours Doha and Kuala Lumpur, is probably an accurate reflection of the channel’s overall orientation.
Each of the four bases is autonomous. Each directs its own network of bureaus and stringers. In the case of Washington, we have bureaus now in Caracas, Buenos Aires and New York, and stringers in La Paz, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Lima, Bogota, Mexico City and Los Angeles. Their assignments are directed out of Washington, and our daily lineups for our news broadcasts are a Washington responsibility.
The idea is that our reports (currently we do two half-hours at 6 and 8 PM EST, eventually we will do three half-hours and a full hour of news out of DC) will reflect, not a single world view, but our regional, Western Hemisphere orientation, as we report on the day. The bigger idea is that every 24 hours, AJE will offer four slightly different, regionally nuanced views of the stories that matter in international news.
Behind this is maybe the biggest idea of all: that in today’s world, any news story of real impact or significance will yield several logical, informed, coherent, respectable interpretations, and that underestanding that story, understanding the world, is facilitated if you comprehend more than one way of looking at it. To that end, we propose every day to offer you a four-pointed parallax of views of the events of the world, as they occur.
What will ground our four news points of view, of course, are the facts on the ground, as reported by our people on the ground, the overwhelming majority of whom are based below the Equator, and who come from the regions they report on. This gives our reporting an authenticity, based not just on familiarity but on wider and deeper networks of local sources, that competing networks depending on “foreign correspondents” cannot match.
The biggest institutional weakness in American television news has nothing to do with questions of liberal or conservative, left or right, even North or South. The stories American TV hates to handle are “bad news.” Sure, TV loves “horrible news,” from fires and plane crashes to homicides and philanderies, but it’s bad business to tell too much of really bad news. The competitive reason is this: People don’t want to hear bad news, and the ratings regularly prove, they will almost always watch something else. In the mid-90s for example, ABC’s prime time minute-by-minute surveys of audience flows showed that mention of the word “Bosnia,” (a place overflowing with sad stories) was enough to stampede audiences to other channels.
Soon, Bosnia and the Balkans went away as subjects for news coverage, even though thousands of American troops continued to serve there. Just as, soon after they became so painfully repetitive, even the “horrible stories” from Iraq went unreported, not to mention never added up. As the story went from bad to worse, editorial zeal, as measured in personnel on the scene and time on the air, diminished. Part of this calculus was the ever-increasing risk for news people in Iraq, but part of was a desire not to be the bearer of grim tidings.
I’ve always thought of news as “the people’s intelligence service.” What kind of intelligence service won’t tell bad news? Oh, I guess Iraq taught us one answer to that question, and gave good insight into the consequences.
Al Jazeera English will have the courage to bring bad news. For good professional journalistic reasons, and with the help of being a global channel. For our broad and diverse audience, there are not only plenty of imperatives to be prepared for the worst reality can offer, but also plenty of disagreement as to which stories represent “bad news” and for whom.
One painful message we will bring to an American audience is how many people and places have come to cherish news most American see as bad. We will also try to show why they have come to these hurtful conclusions.
Why will we do this? Because telling the truth about what’s “out there” is our job and because these ideas exist and have power and cannot be refuted if they go unheard.
It looked like it would be depressing to go unheard in virtually all of the Western Hemisphere on cable and satellite TV. When we launched Nov. 15, we were completely shut out of North America. A month later, we were on three television systems: the Pentagon’s, the State Department’s and the municipally-run cable system of Burlington, Vt. But this is looking like a temporary setback. “The newschannel “they” don’t want you to see,” has become a hot property on the internet. Millions of computer hits from our region are proof to wary cable operators that we do have an American audience. Any fair look at our product demolishes all the nightmare fantasies of “terror TV” slung at us before launch. How long then can commercial censorship last? Not long, I’m betting.
The power of English as a second language was brought home to me through one of the last international stories I reported for Nightline. Examining the impact of Al Qaeda on Southeast Asia, I went to the prep school, Pesantren Ngruki in Solo, Indonesia that is the West Point and Harvard of Jemaa Islamiya, the country’s most powerful jihadi group. The school taught a curriculum that synthesized Indonesian and Islamist education and added two required subjects: Computers and English.
“Computers, I understand,” I said to the headmaster, “But why English for a group that hates the West?” “This is the 21st Century,” he said, “and like it or not, we know English is the language of global politics, economics and philosophy. We want our students to take part in those conversations. So they must speak English.”
“Yikes!” you might say. “You admit, you want to talk to terrorists?”
Yes, we do. And we want to hear from them, too. If you only know a world without them, you’re dangerously ignorant.