Al Jazeera — The World Through a New Lens

By Greg Quill, The Toronto Star, 23 May 2010

The Qatari all-news network Al Jazeera finally made its debut on Canadian TV May 4. Three weeks later, the world is a different place.

By Greg Quill, The Toronto Star, 23 May 2010

The Qatari all-news network Al Jazeera finally made its debut on Canadian TV May 4. Three weeks later, the world is a different place.

The most obvious difference is perspective. Viewers inured to the skewed world view created, out of necessity and with compelling logic, by a business dedicated, long before television, to serving its immediate audience first — local news dominates, followed by regional news, then national news, with overseas news relegated to the outer regions of a faux map — will be stunned, even if they’re prepared for the optics shift, by the dramatic effects of seeing events from all over the world unfold through the eyes of observers for whom the traditional template, with its Western biases and emphasis on money markets, celebrity, power and social well-being, means little or nothing at all.

Sure, Al Jazeera reports world financial news, and it has its share of celebrities. But the business news lede is not the relative value of the American dollar or the state of the first-world’s economies, and its celebrity interview subjects, conducted by dizzyingly busy news mediator and chat show host Riz Khan, one of Al Jazeera’s key operatives, are more along the lines of Indian poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, veteran Cuban jazz singer Omara Portuondo and, yes, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, than with the stars of the latest Hollywood blockbusters or American pop music chart toppers.

The world Al Jazeera sees is clearly not the world North Americans see every night on the preferred networks or all day every day on CNN, CBCNN or the CTV News Channel. And maybe the Qatar-based service’s focus on stories from that vast and under-reported other world — stories about people and nations the West considers disenfranchised, economically handicapped, politically unstable and downright unfriendly — is the reason it took so long to be picked up by Canada’s cable and satellite companies, and why it’s still not being offered by U.S. carriers.

It’s worth noting that the CRTC cleared the Arab-language network for non-basic, discretionary carriage here some six years ago, but it was ignored by signal carriers, unlike dozens of other high-priced specialty channels targeting non-English-speaking communities across the country. The English network, whose North American expansion is now in the hands of Al Jazeera’s managing director, Canadian Tony Burman, an award-winning CBC news veteran, has been up and running since 2006.

Al Jazeera, with its transparently partisan tilt toward dramatic, often grim coverage of events in the Middle East, and a consistent bias favouring stories about opponents of Israeli and U.S. foreign policy in that region, also reports on the state of nations only scantily represented on most Western news services, BBC World aside.

Mistakes are abundant. Despite attempts to English-up the appearance of the network, with big-set desks in Washington and London – there are also bureaus in Russia, India and Africa — and the presence English speaking reporters in the field all over the world — key home-issue programs such as Inside Iraq, a never-ending screaming match between host Jasim Azawi and his weekly guest panelists over arcane political and ideological issues that are never properly explained, are disorientating, to say the least.

But they do serve to remind us — the too easily comforted, the safe, the well-heeled, the well protected and well educated — that it isn’t our world any more, if it ever was.

Al Jazeera has opened a window on another world, maybe the real world. It’s something we need, a breath of fresh air.