FORWARD: When Al-Jazeera announced in early January that it was edging its way more aggressively into the American market (through the purchase of Al Gore’s fairly moribund channel, Current TV, for $500 million), the news was met with a predictable dollop of fear and loathing. Bill O’Reilly jumped to call the Qatari-based channel “anti-American.” Groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the media watchdog CAMERA Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America depicted the move as a possible threat to national security. The ADL’s Abraham Foxman hitched his worry onto a critique of the channel’s Arabic-language station, which, he said allows “all manner of virulent anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic extremists access to its airwaves.”..,
But how could it be any other way? Even the inkling that a news channel that has a possibly, slightly alternative narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might enter the airwaves was bound to be perceived as a threat…
Even if the channel’s reporting is slightly leavened with its particular political perspective — what Kaplan calls a “middle of the road, developing world viewpoint” — this won’t be a bad thing. After all, wrapping news up in a point of view is exactly what Fox News and MSNBC already do quite successfully. If done responsibly, Al-Jazeera could introduce the possibility that other narratives exist to challenge our orthodoxies, those tired old categories. If we are really interested in America having an open marketplace of ideas, each jostling against the other, with the best ideas prevailing on their own merit — a notion O’Reilly and Foxman would surely support — then what would be so worrisome about throwing Al-Jazeera into the mix?… (more)
