Gaza -- Al-Jazeera English, CNN International, and BBC World

Philip Stone January 6, 2009

The Gaza bombing and Israeli ground assault is Al-Jazeera’s opportunity to prove to the western world that its English language TV news service could be watched by mainstream western viewers with some resemblance of reporting balance from both sides. And by and large it’s doing ok.

Much of Al Jazeera’s reporting centered on the humanitarian aspect, with no shortage of verbal reports and pictures of women and children in agony, but it also carried Israeli government statements and had many live interviews with Israeli government and military spokespeople. While the questioning was hard it was, for the most part, fair.

The one interview that really did the Al Jazeera English service no good actually came from one of its Washington anchors, Kimberley Halkett. She had on live via satellite from Israel a rather soft-spoken Israeli defense force spokesman and no sooner did the man try to answer her questions than she challenged every word coming out of his mouth. It’s one thing to have fair and hard questioning, but she was on the verge of shouting the man down -- she certainly verbally overpowered him – going far beyond the mark and showed a bias that will do Al Jazeera no good if its intended audience is mainstream.  

Al Jazeera’s anchors in Doha, London and elsewhere, plus its many correspondents on the ground  -- many coming from respected Western news organizations -- left little doubt that logistically Al Jazeera had the area covered far better than the rest and although the reporters often slipped in their thinking about the unfolding human misery their reporting was, for the most part, fair. Ms. Halkett may have shown her Doha masters how angry she was at the unfolding events, and as an individual that’s okay but as an on-air TV anchor for an international news organization? 

Or put another way, if that is what Al Jazeera expects and applauds from its English language TV anchors then it’s going to continue to have a hard time cracking into US cable systems! 

And talking of hard questioning, even over at CNN International the line was being, if not crossed, then just about stepped on by senior anchor Jim Clancy. At times his questioning of Israeli officials seemed to go beyond the professionalism he usually shows of asking really hard questions but at least giving the interviewee a chance to respond.  But Clancy obviously had not liked the pictures he saw coming out of Gaza via Arab satellite services and he didn’t like the explanations he heard from Israeli spokespeople, and he would interrupt, and interrupt and interrupt… There’s a point where the argumentative scenario fails to work.

Indeed interrupt often seems to be the name of the interview game these days. The rules have apparently changed. It used to be you asked a question, you got the answer, if the answer avoided the question you’d ask it again in another way. But today the form seems to be to ask the question and if you don’t like the answer coming back then don’t let the person finish—just go after him/her.

With satellite transmission that simply creates an audio mess. The time delay – a couple of seconds or so – has people stopping in mid-sentence – then silence as they hear the interruption – then because there is silence the anchor asks the question again just when the interviewee  has started to answer. Surely control rooms and anchors understand that interruption can work moderately in a studio with the guest sitting across from you, but when using satellite transmission with its various time delays it turns into a fiasco. Having said that, Clancy’s in-studio interview with the Israeli consul for the southeastern US would have been far more effective if he had let the man finish answering questions and then being challenged instead of continually interrupting him.

BBC World again did what it does very well – it gets an anchor actually on site very quickly for the big story. So whereas as Al Jazeera was still anchoring from Doha, London, or Washington, and CNN was anchoring from Atlanta, London, and Hong Kong  there on BBC World was Lyse Doucet anchoring from the Israel-Gaza border for 15 minutes or so at the top of each half hour program and sometimes for longer. Having an anchor in flak-jacket on-site just adds to the reality – far more so than a suit (male of female) sitting in Atlanta.

Behind the scenes it must take a lot of co-ordination to do that kind of on-site anchor operation, but the BBC seems to be able to activate that far sooner than its competition. It did so recently from Mumbai – never did see CNN anchor the hotel sieges on-site although it had Anthony Stevens, a Hong Kong anchor, actually in the city.

CNN finally started some on-site anchoring Monday, flying in London anchor Fionnuala Sweeney, she broadcasting from somewhere outside in safe Jerusalem which is a start but still not in the field with Doucet. Sweeney did a fine job a couple of years back during the Israel-Hezbollah action in Lebanon, anchoring from an Israeli city often under rocket attack, and at that time CNN also had London anchor Becky Anderson in Beirut along with former London anchor and now Atlanta anchor Hala Gorani, and the switching then between the two locales was really top-class. But as of Monday night Gorani, who hosts CNN’s monthly Inside The Middle East, usually from the region, was still sitting firmly in her Atlanta anchor chair.

CNN did send in some big guns – senior correspondent Nic Robertson from London and chief correspondent Christiane Armanpour from New York—great to finally see her again on a breaking news story rather than documentaries, but what took her so long to get there?

Overall, Al Jazeera has been doing well. Its coverage of the Mumbai attacks and now Gaza shows it certainly has logistical advantages in that part of the world, and if it can only keep its reporters and anchors straight for a mainstream international audience, then it really can be a viable cable news alternative to CNN International  and BBC World.