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It's Arab news in Western style©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, DOHA, Qatar -- "We are a new trend in the Arab world," Ibrahim M. Helal was saying Thursday night in a corner of the busy newsroom of Al-Jazeera, the satellite television channel now known all over the world for broadcasting Osama bin Laden's defiant speech on Oct. 7. "Using the Western style, we have broken many taboos. "Of course," added Helal, 32, the network's chief editor, "we upset most of the other Arab states." Thursday's major exclusive was from Tayseer Allouni, the station's correspondent in Kandahar, the Taliban headquarters -- the only reporter there -- with videotape of two U.S. warplanes in a clear blue sky bombing the center of the Taliban's operations. The videotape was later shown on CNN. In a part of the world where news has always been the news the government wants, true or not, Al-Jazeera is truly a phenomenon. Throughout the Arab world, state television typically leads its newscast each night with the doings of the local potentate, frequently stepping off an airplane or waiting on the tarmac, embracing a fellow potentate. This is interspersed with clips of soldiers and tanks charging into mock battle as martial music plays in the background. But Al-Jazeera, whose slogan is "The opinion -- the other opinion," is something different. Its guest interviewees have ranged from the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and the longtime Israeli peace advocate Shimon Peres, to the uncompromising militants Sheik Hassan Nasrullah of Hezbollah and Sheik Ahmed Yaseen of Hamas, and even Secretary of State Colin Powell. Like the shortwave radio broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that helped chip away at the Soviet empire, it is difficult to black out. Satellite dishes jump off the shelves, and even in countries like Iran that forbid them, there is a brisk business in disguising the discs as part of a garden. The Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif described the importance of Al-Jazeera to the Arab world, writing in the British newspaper the Guardian, "It is the one window through which we can breathe." He recalled flipping through the channels in a Cairo hotel room and coming upon a station in Arabic with people speaking "in a way I had only ever heard people speak in private -- away from the censorship and the various state security services that dominate our public discourse." "Within the Arab world, this channel has made censorship of news and opinion pointless," Soueif wrote. Al-Jazeera was founded in 1996 as the showpiece of the new emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, as a symbol of his plans to modernize. It leaped to prominence in the last year covering the Palestinian intifada, with viewers throughout the Arab world glued to its broadcasts. Helal, an Egyptian, who like much of his young staff grew up working for the BBC and absorbing the traditional news values of the West, said that the emir has protected Al-Jazeera from political pressures. The station has 35 bureaus around the world and concentrates unabashedly on such forbidden topics as the absence of democratic institutions, the persecution of political dissidents and the inequality of women. "Objectivity is our aim," Halel said. "But in this part of the world it is very difficult." Responding to criticism by Powell that Al-Jazeera was broadcasting propaganda, Halel said: "We learned free speech in America. How can you ask us to hinder it? If we interfere between information and our audience, it is the start of our end." Asked about bin Laden's dramatic appearance on Oct. 7, Halel first noted that Al-Jazeera, alone among Arab stations, had earlier broadcast interviews with a bin Laden rival, Ahmed Shah Massoud of the rebel Northern Alliance, who was assassinated shortly before the attacks on the United States.
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From the Times wire desk
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