For those of us that have waited months, and then years, to actually see Al Jazeera on television in English, watching the countdown clock on its test pattern broadcast—first in hours, then in seconds—was truly a surreal experience.

Coupled with a rumbling drumbeat, the nerve-racking ticker evoked the anticipation of a shuttle launch, a theme borrowed by Music Television when it first hit the airwaves in 1981.

After about eight weeks of broadcasting, it’s too early to tell if Al Jazeera’s impact on the news business will be as significant as that of MTV on the music industry. This is because what Al Jazeera English (AJE) is doing is truly unprecedented. And despite the inevitable flurry of comparisons with its Arabic counterpart, AJE is a different product altogether. The most common denominator between these two massive investments by the Qatari royal family (AJE is reported to have cost the Emir up to $1 billion) is a mission to challenge the existing order fueled by an ethos of rebellion among its staff and a constant supply of cash to transform their idealistic visions into reality. And what better way to put a tiny desert kingdom on the map?

The process began ten years ago when Al Jazeera crossed a milestone by introducing Middle Easterners to the concept of hard-hitting television news, a first in a region dominated by state-sponsored propaganda video. But with AJE, the struggle will be taking place on a much larger scale. In this latest war of information, the battleground is global, not regional, and the opponents are not Arab despots, but rather the wealthiest media tycoons of the world.

Dubbed the “Un-CNN” by the American University of Cairo’s Lawrence Pintak, AJE went where none of its competitors could from the very outset. During its maiden newscast, it featured a live report from Zimbabwe, where CNN and BBC are banned. In its opening hour, the channel also went live to Darfur, Mogadishu and rural Brazil and later featured reports from the slums of Afghanistan, election polls in Mauritania and the plight of Congo’s child miners, a package introduced as “Gold digging for the rich.”

And it’s not just news. AJE featured a profile of Kazakhstan’s equestrian team on its program Sportsworld and played an independent film called “Being Osama,” which chronicled the lives of ordinary men named Osama, on the show Witness. Later it was Al Jazeera at the movies, with The Fabulous Picture Show. But Amanda Palmer, the striking blonde host and former CNN personality, didn’t waste very much time talking about the latest Bond flick. Instead, she devoted most of her show to two young Moroccan filmmakers.

AJE, which employs over 500 journalists, may sound like an extended humanitarian infomercial, but its production standards are leaps ahead of UN Television. In fact, on a technical level, AJE already appears to have an edge on CNN International and BBC World, the two networks that have dominated international television news for over a decade.

The sets of the American and Anglo channels seem cramped when compared to those of Doha-based AJE. Its wall screens are bigger, its graphics are more animated and its main news center, a cavernous array of buzzing desks and flat panel displays, is regularly shown off in a crane cam flythrough. It is also the first news network to be broadcast in High Definition. But technology is just an equalizer. What AJE is really about is content.

Just as the Arabic network introduced television journalism to the Middle East, AJE is introducing news about the relatively poor “Global South” to an international system that is pretty much monopolized by news from the relatively wealthy West. In doing so, it is taking on a colossal challenge that runs contrary to business sense and the general trends that dominate the media and entertainment industries in a capitalist world. That is, turning alternative into popular, bringing marginalized into mainstream and making the utopian a reality. In some respects, it is completely illogical. But so too, some may have argued before September 11 2001, was the Arabic Al Jazeera’s decision to establish an office in Kabul, far removed from the daily concerns of the average Arab.

As a result of that move, Al Jazeera’s exclusive footage and its logo were appearing on television sets around the world and, five years after its inception, the station was on its way to becoming one of the most powerful brands on Earth. Over the years, the Arabic network paid a heavy price for that reputation, seeing its bureaus shut down or bombed outright and its journalists either arrested or killed. But for AJE the learning curve has come even faster. Having been barred access to the United States, one of its biggest potential markets, AJE was dealt a huge blow even before it was born.

Omar Bec, the channel’s managing editor in Doha says the decision to reject AJE by America’s main cable and satellite distributors had nothing to do with politics. “Each provider, each distributor has their capacity and I think they have met their quota,” he told MEB Journal. “I don’t think there is any political aspect.”

However in an interview with AFP, the channel’s new Washington anchor, Dave Marash, described the move to block AJE in the US as “a minute-right wing conspiracy.” Whatever the truth may be, Al Jazeera’s struggle to gain access to the American market, epitomized by criticism of it in the press, is symbolic of the challenges it may face in the months and years ahead.

“Terror TV”

On CBS News, one of the few American networks to report the launch of AJE, anchorwoman Katie Couric introduced the new channel by defining its parent network as the Arab channel that “outraged the much of the Western world by broadcasting messages from Osama Bin Laden and a rouge’s gallery of other terrorists.”

The CBS report focused on the fact that AJE would only be viewable to Americans over its website, or as reporter Wyatt Andrews put it, “Any American wanting to know ‘the enemy’ will have to watch on the internet.” The answer to this seeming riddle was simple according to Cliff Kincaid, who was described by CBS as a “conservative critic.” Kincaid explained: “The vast majority of Americans do not want Osama bin Laden’s propaganda put into their living rooms sets.” But CBS failed to identify Kincaid as the director of the documentary “Terror Television: The Rise of Al Jazeera and the Hate America Media.”

Soon after its launch, a fiery view of AJE was also published in the New York Sun by Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute. “A platform for such hatred should not be welcomed,” he wrote, “and certainly not from an office located a few blocks from the White House.” Stalinsky was referring to AJE’s Washington broadcast center, manned by Marash, a former ABC news correspondent for the show “Nightline” where he worked for 16 years.

But there were also a few positive views from the American media. On National Public Radio, TV critic Troy Patterson described AJE as “a thorough digest of what’s going on in the rest of the world,” adding the channel was “not anti-American, it’s simply non-American.” He said AJE’s visual presentation was “slick” and even complimented its music as “crisp and loungy-er” than that of CNN or BBC. “I think cable companies would be doing something of a public service to air the channel,” he concluded.

“Contemptuous attitude”

Critics that did not see AJE as blatantly anti-American are still suspicious though. AJE does not feature any of the propagandistic clips of its Arabic sister channel, such as pictures of dead children juxtaposed with footage of American bomber jets.

But to say that AJE does not have a message for the US government would be naïve. The station runs a number of voiceless factoid clips marked by flashy large type letters set to aggressive guitar rifts. One video highlights the number of nuclear weapons in the world, beginning with three- digit figures for Israel and India, then listing the thousands of nukes in Russia, followed by “North Korea: 1”, “Iran: ?” and then United States is flashed on screen with a “10,000” plus figure. The segment ends by displaying the slogan “Al Jazeera, every side, every angle.”

The language of AJE’s scripts as well as its selection of stories also often paint a negative picture of America. In December, an AJE package profiled deformed Vietnamese children suffering from the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. It noted that the US had rejected paying reparations. Around the same time, another report noted that the US had adopted a “hostile attitude” toward North Korea.

Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Dante Chinni also picked up on the vocabulary when an AJE package described Bush’s recent trip to Asia as “failing” to secure cooperative agreements on how to deal with Iran. Chinni also noted that the station’s news agenda “focused on the Middle East” and was “one that included subtle and not-so subtle jabs at the US Administration.”

Mark Lawson, writing in British daily The Guardian, agreed, indicating that there had been an “unbalanced concentration” on Middle Eastern news, resulting in an “almost contemptuous attitude toward US and UK affairs.”

Indeed AJE featured far less coverage of recent trips abroad made by British and US presidents Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Even Blair’s visit to Middle Eastern capitals was only carried toward the end of AJE’s newscast as opposed to the prominence it received on the BBC. Similarly, the collapse of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi made breaking news on CNN, while AJE covered the news initially only on its crawl graphic, and later broadcast a brief package during its regularly newscast—no rush.

Ignoring the American obsession with breaking news seemed to be a hallmark of AJE’s news judgment. It reacted similarly after the death of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, carrying the news as only a brief package during its scheduled newscast while CNN and SKY News immediately broke into regular programming and continued to run the story continuously as “breaking” for at least half an hour.

“Light on news”

Another major difference between Al Jazeera and its Anglo-American counterparts is that its news pieces are generally longer and less snappy, while documentary-style shows abound. Perhaps this is because AJE espouses an aversion to over-simplifications and thus its stories seem to introduce more angles than would be the case with ‘conventional’ all-news networks.

AJE’s Dave Marash admitted that the pace would be slower. “My motto is ‘news at the speed of thought’,” he was quoted as saying in the Washington Post. Others offered an alternate take. “The sense I get at the moment is that they are playing with a massive library of documentaries that they have stocked over the last year,” says Hugh Miles, the author of Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World, in an article that appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly.

The AUC’s Lawrence Pintak seems to agree. “With all the delays, the channel had plenty of ‘exclusive’ (but largely news-less) interviews and evergreens in the can and it seemed determined to use them, come Hell or high water,” Pintak wrote on the University of Southern California’s Public Diplomacy Blog. He added that the channel “remained light on news and heavy on compassion” into week one, but seemed enthused by AJE’s coverage of anti-government protests in Beirut. AJE’s analytical insights on Lebanese players had “finally begun to separate it from the pack,” he wrote.

And unlike CNN, during the events in Lebanon, AJE often backed off the term “Hezballah-led” to describe the demonstrations in Beirut, labeling them more often as “opposition protestors” since Christian and other Shiite groups also took part. AJE also seemed to be playing down the prefix “pro-Syrian” and “pro-Iranian” in its description of Hezballah as compared to CNN, a decision that could meet mixed reaction in the Arab world.

Who’s really watching?

AJE has said its signal reaches 80 million households, but hard ratings figures have yet to be released. The speculation among some critics is that by ignoring much of the news covered by other networks, AJE will have a hard time attracting a Western audience.

“An English language broadcaster will surely limit its potential audience by continuing this editorial belittlement of the biggest English-speaking cultures,” writes Mark Lawson in the Guardian. But some in the East also have their doubts about the station’s penetration rates, especially because cable and satellite households are relatively rare across much of the developing world.

In Malaysia for example, direct to home satellite service covers “just a sliver of the population,” writes Imran Imtiaz Sha Yacob, on the news site Asia Sentinel. With a broadcast center in Kuala Lumpur, Yacob is hopeful that AJE will be able to break ranks with the “docile nature of the local press,” and possibly “be able to change how Malaysia sees itself.” Al Jazeera recently aired a show highlighting racial tensions in the country-“you won’t find that on the evening news in KL,” notes Yacob, a broadcast journalist.

But he doubts the network will be able to have an impact on the country’s rural residents: “While the majority of rural Malays understand basic English, Al Jazeera’s broadcasters practice a level of English that may be too high for the kampong or village folks.”

Queen’s English does seem to be ubiquitous on AJE, a reality that may also be alienating to many middle-class Americans. But while US viewers struggle to view AJE on the net, and ponder their own media moguls’ decision not to air the network, AJE is getting a vote of confidence from an unlikely source.

In December 2006, Israeli satellite provider Yes TV dropped BBC World from its offering in order to make room for AJE, according to a report that appeared in the Guardian. Although the BBC will still be available in Israel on cable, it will reportedly lose around 50 percent of its audience as a result of Yes’s decision.

The move should give critics, especially American ones, a whole new set of questions to ponder. Specifically, how could a station which provides “a platform for Holocaust denial and hate speech against Israel”—according to a November article in the Washington Post—be more palatable to Israelis than Americans?

Others (in addition to the BBC of course) will wonder how a relative newcomer has been able to unseat one of the world’s oldest broadcasters in just a matter of weeks, particularly one whose news judgment has been so deeply scrutinized. Among the world’s media titans, the fear, undoubtedly, is that Yes TV will not be an isolated case.