Tearing Down The Walls

It was a typical al-Jazeera moment, one loaded with controversy. Two weeks ago, a story broke that a U.S. State Department official had told the Arabic-language TV channel that the U.S. had acted with arrogance and stupidity in the Iraq war. The State Department initially denied that the official, Alberto Fernandez, a spokesman for the Near Eastern Affairs bureau, had said any such thing. But a [an error occurred while processing this directive]review of the transcript soon proved otherwise. The broadcast was accurate. And al-Jazeera had made news again.

The channel — which celebrates 10 years on the air this week — has been doing that since it was founded. It has its faults. But al-Jazeera has served the truth far better than many of its detractors would acknowledge. Indeed, arguably nothing — including the Bush Administration's panoply of democratization programs — has done more than al-Jazeera to open minds and challenge authority in the Middle East. The channel's launch marked the beginning of a process of tearing down the psychological wall that made ordinary Arabs afraid to speak out, and which had rendered Arab dictators so invincible. It is loathed by autocrats in the Middle East, while the Bush Administration, too, has had its beefs with al-Jazeera, at times vigorously objecting to its coverage of the U.S.-led war on terror.

The channel's journalists have faced endless professional and personal hazards. But al-Jazeera has remained on the air, which, given the region's legacy of repression, is a remarkable achievement in itself. Later this month, a long-anticipated channel in English, al-Jazeera International (aji), should finally start broadcasting. So 10 years on, it's worth asking: How has al-Jazeera done what it has done? What can it do better? And what does its future hold?

The channel's founding story is by now familiar in the Middle East. In the mid-1990s, a partnership between the bbc and Saudi investors to launch an all-news channel collapsed. The Emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, brought the newly unemployed Arab journalists to his gulf state, pledging not to interfere in their editorial decisions. Indeed, there is a sense in which al-Jazeera's story is also that of the Emir.

Born in 1952, Sheik Hamad staged a coup against his inattentive father in 1995. A reformer by nature, the Emir is married to the conservative gulf's most progressive First Lady. When he came to power, he was concerned about the region's stagnating politics and rising extremism, and so sought to distance Qatar's future from that of Saudi Arabia, its domineering Wahhabite neighbor. The Emir promulgated Qatar's first constitution, held elections, appointed a woman to the Cabinet, modernized the education system and allowed Christian churches to be constructed. Al-Jazeera's popularity brought Qatar status and diplomatic clout, and has also given the Emir political cover as he has turned Qatar into one of the region's closest U.S. allies, despite the unpopularity of Washington's policies. Qatar hosts the U.S. military's regional command center for the war in Iraq.

But it is for its impact outside Qatar — in less liberal parts of the Arab world — that al-Jazeera is most famous. Lawrence Pintak, a former cbs News correspondent who directs the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism in Cairo, says, "You cannot overstate the impact that al-Jazeera has had on the Arab world and the broader Muslim world." For the first time, independent Arab journalists delivered uncensored news reports, rather than government propaganda and lies, to Arab TV audiences. Al-Jazeera's talk shows featured hosts and guests who roundly criticized anything they wanted to — not only the U.S. and Israel (that was to be expected) but Arab leaders as well.

The channel's programs broke ground by examining social issues such as polygamy, and provided in-depth coverage of foreign topics such as American presidential campaigns. Thanks to satellite technology, al-Jazeera was able to beam its broadcasts across national borders, hooking up Arabs from Morocco to Iraq in a vast, unprecedented conversation about the region's concerns. "Suddenly you had a channel that was saying things and showing things that you never heard or saw before," Pintak says. "People were saying on television what they had only said behind closed doors."

That changed everything, from the way Arabs understood themselves and the outside world, to the manner in which Arab governments related to their people. Al-Jazeera programs told the stories behind political assassinations, and showed viewers how Arabs lag in both economics and culture. "One program explained how the number of books published in Greece is 10 times more than the number published in all Arab countries," says Ahmed Sheikh, the Arabic channel's editor in chief. "We were saying, 'This is a reality. We have to catch up with the rest of the world.'"

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