Anyone following events in Tunisia and Egypt and subsequently Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere has detected a debate looming over the events themselves, one which I think ought not be dismissed, because it is indicative of a larger trend in media.
Al Jazeera has used its seriously comprehensive coverage of Egyptian protests (featuring reporters who seemingly never sleep) as its moment to not only assert its primacy and reliability among news organizations in the region, but to portray Al Jazeera English as an invaluable resource to the English-speaking world. AJE has been promoting its tweet reminding viewers that live coverage is available through live blog or live video coverage online since early in the protests, and is using the opportunity to start a grassroots movement among its US watchers to tell their cable providers to provide AJE as part of one of their programming options (none of them currently do) with the #demandaljazeera promoted hashtag.
From the #demandaljazeera tweets and other comments on articles I’ve read related to Al Jazeera or media coverage of the Middle East, the consensus seems to be that cable providers in the US are bowing to government political pressure by not offering AJE, although that’s never been a stated reason. Certainly, the Bush Administration’s relentless criticism of Al Jazeera during the Iraq War, as documented by Marc Lynch, would suggest that a climate has been created in which AJE could be a tricky thing for any provider to be the first to offer. The fact that Al Jazeera English was founded explicitly as an alternative to the status quo of news and that it sought to “reverse the north to south flow of information” serve only to feed into the fears of Americans already predisposed to be skeptical of it.
Jillian C. York’s post about criticisms of Al Jazeera’s coverage of CBS reporter Lara Logan’s rape in Cairo goes to show that US commentators now use any occasion to accentuate even small differences between Al Jazeera’s coverage of an event and Western coverage. The sad reality for American media is that Al Jazeera probably does a better job of covering the issue of rape in depth and around the world than American media do. During the coverage of Tunisia, Al Jazeera was criticized (hilariously) for having an anti-authoritarian bias. Jillian York rightly points out that you’d be hard pressed to find a single publication or news outlet in America that didn’t have an even stronger anti-authoritarian bias.
I think there is a certain amount of simple xenophobia and following of the Bush Administration’s lead in US criticism and fear of the power of Al Jazeera. I think what that masks, however, is a real fear on behalf of an American news media which has long had a hegemony over consumption of foreign news. The great fear of the NBCs and CNNs of the world is that consumers will rebel over the quality of most mainstream news, and those with an interest in world news will watch Al Jazeera English and get domestic news from blogs or some other combination of practices which will make an all-encompassing mainstream domestic news behemoth obsolete. Am I right in detecting this motive, or does anti-AJE mood stem from something else entirely?
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