By Delinda C. Hanley

JOURNALISTS FROM around the world gathered at the Intercontinental Hotel in Doha, Qatar on July 13 and 14 for the first world forum hosted by Al Jazeera Channel. The Doha forum, on "Changing Media Perceptions: Professionalism and Cultural Diversity," opened with a provocative discussion of the ethics involved in live telecasts of armed conflicts. This topic was vital for the network, which has been both criticized and lauded for transmitting pictures of human suffering and death from conflict areas. Attendees also examined the peculiar relationship between media and governments, particularly in regard to war coverage in Iraq.

Ironically, three weeks later, Iraq's interim government ordered Al Jazeera's Baghdad office closed for a month, charging that by showing images of hostages in Iraq, the TV network incites violence and hatred. Conference participants spent much of their time discussing this same issue, trying to delineate where freedom of information turns into incitement, and where omission becomes censorship. Unfortunately, there was no representative from Iraq's interim government to hear the views offered by journalists from many nations.

Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East

book by Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Westview Press, 2002

Reviewed by Sally Bland

Until a few years ago, Arab viewers often tuned in to foreign channels to get breaking news, even if it was happening right next door to them. The launch of Al Jazeera in 1996 changed all that. Not only did the Qatar-based, 24-hour satellite news network bring live coverage of what Arab audiences wanted to see, it also made its name internationally, with global media taking their stories from Jazeera scoops.

Evaluating the network in terms of professionalism, objectivity, appeal to Arab audiences, relation to Arab governments, including Qatar, and impact in the West, this book presents Al Jazeera as the Arab answer to CNN, although the network modelled itself more on the BBC, where many of its founding staff previously worked.

Nawawy and Iskandar, both of Egyptian origin and university teachers of journalism and communications in North America, depict Al Jazeera as a sort of double-edged sword. On the one hand, it slices through the silence and distortions of Western reporting on the Middle East; on the other, it gatecrashes the censorship and rigidity of regional media, "raising eyebrows in the Middle East and elsewhere for its provocative approach to news analysis". (p. 22)

By Daoud Kuttab

No one is indifferent to Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based Arab satellite television station. You can sense the blood of U.S. officials boil when they discuss it. To be sure, in the context of the dream of all Arabs being united and independent of foreign control, Al Jazeera is undeniably partial to Arab aspirations. But that does not make its news reporting untruthful.

In fact, Al Jazeera, which Secretary of State Colin Powell calls ''horrible'' and ''slanted,'' is a pivotal vehicle for reform and change, which genuinely democratic Arab activists and the international community alike have been calling for. So incensed has America been, however, that it created its own Arabic-language mouthpiece in the form of satellite station Al Hurra.

Arabs don't trust it because Al Hurra has demonstrated its lapdog status by never broadcasting images of prisoners being abused inside Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. In this respect, at least, Al Hurra fits perfectly within the tame tradition of Arab state broadcasters.

But instead of bashing or seeking to undermine Al Jazeera, politicians should encourage this bastion of free expression, recognizing that Arabs will need to endure a messy process on the way to democracy. Along that tortuous route, the world's major powers are bound to be offended, probably quite regularly.

Documentary Brings Forbidden Images to American Viewers

By Judith Gabriel

Egyptian-American documentary producer Jehane Noujaim, whose documentary "Control Room" broke box office records in its first week of screenings at the prestigious New York Film Forum in June, was fascinated by the contradiction between the popularity of Al Jazeera with the Arab public and how it was denounced by many governments, both Arab and the U.S. She was also curious about the people at Al Jazeera, the journalists who were "taking basically hell from the entire world."

"Over the course of the last year, the station was roundly criticized by the U.S. government, yet I would go home to Egypt and my father would be watching," she told Al Ahram weekly, commenting on her interest in Al Jazeera. "The contradiction between its popularity with the Arab public and how hated it was by many Arab governments was fascinating. "

The 29-year-old filmmaker took aim at how the War on Iraq was depicted on Al Jazeera. As the missiles struck Baghdad on March 19, 2003, and the Western media was being "parachuted" into Baghdad to get a ringside seat for the action, Noujaim took a unique vantage point, watching events unfold from inside Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

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