In the summer of 1997 the nine-month-old Arab news outlet Al Jazeera was an almost complete unknown. Broadcasting just 12 hours a day from Qatar and stuck with a weak Ku-band transponder–all that was available on the single overcrowded satellite then serving the region–the station languished until the French, ever the agents of exotic cultural exchange, interceded. On a Saturday afternoon in July the leaseholders of the satellite’s mighty C-band transponder, Canal France International, accidentally broadcast a hard-core porn movie–Club Prive au Portugal–in place of the educational fare slated to run. As many as 33 million Islamic viewers may have been watching, and the consequences were swift: CFI was expelled from the Arabsat satellite and Al Jazeera took its place. Few observers could have predicted how much more troublesome to the status quo than mere Western filth the station would quickly become.
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A Saudi-born British journalist who’s written for the London Review of Books and the Sunday Times, Miles got interested in Al Jazeera during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when he was monitoring Arab news feeds for Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News. The station’s top-of-the-line footage drew him in, and an article about its coverage of the war led to this full-scale assessment. Granted apparently unfettered access to reporters and daily operations by the station’s management–who were eager, he says, “to have an independent observer snoop around”–he’s compiled something thoughtful as well as thorough. He comes off as faintly starstruck at times–Yosri Fouda, the host of an investigative program on the station, is described as “an impeccable dresser with eyes like the palace cat . . . the sort of man you are very glad decided to work for the forces of good, rather than evil”–but he consistently goes out of his way to dig up multiple takes on a given controversy, even when they raise serious questions about Al Jazeera’s purported objectivity. And while he’s more left than the average American on the big Arab questions, he subjects his own positions to the same empirical scrutiny he champions in Al Jazeera to present an admirably even handed account of almost inherently polarizing material.
Founded in 1996 by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, Al Jazeera broadcasts from Doha, the Qatari capital. A tiny nation sandwiched “like a mouse sharing a cage with two rattlesnakes” between Saudi Arabia and (across the Gulf) Iran, Qatar has a population of about 800,000. Its vast natural gas stores have given it one of the world’s highest per-capita incomes, which, combined with its size and relative ethnic homogeneity, has insulated the country from the social unrest that plagues its larger, more socially stratified neighbors. A close relationship with the U.S., which has invested buckets of defense dollars in Qatar at As Sayliyah, the base outside Doha where Centcom is located, hasn’t hurt either.
Voices diverging from the region’s twin orthodoxies, autocracy and Islam, weighed in on the moral status of Hezbollah, pan-Arab state corruption, and the viability of democracy in the region. Before long Al Jazeera had outraged every government in the region; its reporters have since been banned or expelled from almost every Arab nation at one time or another. In classic fashion, of course, each suppression has only validated the station’s claims of editorial independence and further boosted its clout on the “Arab street.”
But when it comes to Al Jazeera conspiracy theories, everyone’s got one, and we’ve arrived rather late to the game. The West may label the station anti-Semitic for its relentless (and grisly) coverage of the intifada, but in the Arab world its broadcast of Israelis speaking Hebrew–another regional first–and positively seditious criticism of the ruling classes got it pegged long ago as a Zionist subterfuge. Rivals Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran have viewed it at best as an instrument of nouveau riche Qatari ambitions for regional dominance, at worst as a covert American operation designed to destabilize and fragment the whole Arab world. And of course almost every Middle Eastern dictator has eyed the station as an instigator of the pan-Arab populism that’s his deepest, darkest fear.
On perhaps the most damning matter–the pending trial in Spain of Al Jazeera star Taysir Alluni, who scored a controversial 2001 interview with bin Laden, on charges of funneling funds for Al Qaeda–he builds a strong defense, with convincing help from Al Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout, but admits to smelling something fishy in Alluni’s story.
