Will Gaza Do For Al Jazeera English What the First Gulf War Did For CNN?

Philip Stone January 15, 2009

Since our basically positive review 10 days ago of Al Jazeera’ English language news coverage of Gaza we’ve been watching with some amusement as other analysts on both sides of the Atlantic have caught up to the fact that if you really want comprehensive Gaza coverage then Al Jazeera English is the place to be.

So when the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune run a major piece highlighting Al Jazeera’s coverage including that it has more feet on the ground in Israel, Gaza, Egypt and other Middle East cities than anyone else, well this has to be manna from heaven for the Qatar-based network.

And it seems to know it is on to a good thing. Constant monitoring of CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera English shows that on almost any hour now the Al Jazeera coverage is running at least twice as long as on the others if not more. If you want to get immersed in what is happening in Gaza, and get it played pretty straight considering the ownership, then Al Jazeera is the place to watch.

For CNN International and BBC World, Gaza may still be the first story on most newscasts but the time committed to that story has dwindled appreciably. There’s the world’s economic meltdown, the lack of gas supplies to Eastern Europe because of a Russia-Ukraine tiff, Obama’s upcoming inauguration and so on and while there still seems to be liberal usage by everyone of the “Breaking News” tag the coverage of Gaza is far less than it was at the outset of hostilities.

It also could mean that Israel’s policy of not allowing correspondents in Israel from crossing into Gaza might have had the effect Israel wanted. While the cable networks bad mouth the Israelis for keeping them out, the fact is they don’t have an independent view of what is happening there, relying instead on Palestinian broadcasters, their own producers who live in Gaza, and foreigners – aid workers, medical staff and the like. But over at Al Jazeera they have two of their own correspondents on the ground for the English service and another four for the Arabic-language service, and they have all the logistics necessary to back up such an operation.

In our household we now know that if it’s 15 minutes past the hour then not much use trying to find out about Gaza on CNN or BBC World – unless something really different and serious occurs – but switch to Al Jazeera and their Gaza coverage is still rolling usually for the full half-hour if not beyond.

And what really seems rather amazing for such a story is that we watched the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams a few times in the past days and we were amazed that even though NBC has its chief foreign correspondent  on site, there were a couple of nights recently when the network just devoted a few seconds of video and a Brian Williams talk over and by Wednesday it was 10 seconds of story from Williams and no video  -- it spent more time on Ricardo Montalban’s death than it did Gaza! Really amazing lack of coverage, but no doubt the network will tell you that Obama, and the economy and all the rest are far more important to an American audience.

Is that why Americans with ever increasing numbers are turning more and more to UK newspapers for news because they can’t get their required dosage of foreign coverage  at home?

Whatever, the stain for Al Jazeera, of course, is that it is Arab-owned and the Bush Administration has often in the past chided the network for its Iraq coverage – really its Arab language coverage but to the Administration it is all one big umbrella. That’s probably why just three cable systems in the US take the Al Jazeera English service which really is a pity, but it is available in Washington D.C which means decision makers can have a look.

So, is Al Jazeera’s Gaza coverage biased? Well, there can be no doubt how their correspondents and anchors feel about the Gaza carnage of women and children, although they do give the Israeli side that their forces try to avoid such casualties. And the network frequently interviews live from Jerusalem Israeli spokespeople and depending on the anchor they might well ask some pretty hard direct questions but nothing that one might call out-of-bounds except for one particular occasion we mentioned in our January 6 piece and that was from a Canadian based in Washington D.C.

And the questions posed by the anchors in their Arab and Palestinian interviews are also pretty hard hitting – they seem to ask the right hard questions there too. The fact is ftm has received many comments after our January 6 piece about the anti-Israel bias allegedly shown by CNN International and BBC World so obviously you just can’t please all of the people all of the time, but as far as discernable bias is concerned there’s not much to choose between them --none obviously like what is going on in Gaza, they all report on why Israel is doing what it is doing and they report the results as best they can on what is happening to people in Gaza.

Sure Al Jazeera has plenty of interviews with leading Arab politicians and academics who all seem to have a unanimous view of the goings-on, but if you listen to them for a while and get through the rhetoric you get a picture of what is really being thought about in the Arab world – you may not agree necessarily with what is being said but you can’t complain you don’t know what people are thinking.

Al Jazeera management are doing a smart thing – they know their coverage is getting wide-spread praise, they have been Internet streaming, their service is available on many Internet TV services, and now Al Jazeera has just announced that it is making its video available via the Internet to any news organization that wants to use it free of charge, just give attribution. That should get its video onto a lot of news sites and that attribution should be worth its weight in gold.

CNN made its mark with the first Gulf War – remember back in 1991 Bernard Shaw reporting by telephone from under a table in his hotel when American aircraft first started bombing Baghdad – and there can be no doubt in that vein that Gaza is Al Jazeera’s war. If the editorial message can stay pretty straight – and other cable news networks these days seem to be showing biases more and more – then when it comes to the Middle East and southern Asia, India, Pakistan and generally that  geographic region then Al Jazeera really does seem to have the rest beat.

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