The Al-Jazeera Moment

Notes internacionals CIDOB, núm. 33

April 2011: “The Telegraph” reports from Washington that senior aides to President Barack Obama lavish praise on Al-Jazeera television, readily confess that during the Egypt uprising Al-Jazeera English was basically all they watched to try to make sense of what was going on, and let it be known that the President was one of those glued to the screen.

Four weeks before, on Capitol Hill, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had gone even further, delivering what sounded like an advert for Al-Jazeera: “Viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news”, she said. “You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news”.

Coincidentally, in yet another show of the special relationship bonding the US and the UK, David Cameron admitted he was also a fan. According to “The Telegraph”, the British Prime Minister told friends that he considers Al-Jazeera to be essential viewing because it is “the only network that gives the texture of what the Arab Street is thinking”. (“The Telegraph”, 26 May 2011)

All this is quite remarkable, considering both countries operate global trade-mark networks such as CNN and the BBC, which rightly claim a global coverage and a global audience. And it is a far cry from the post-9/11 years, when Tony Blair allegedly dissuaded George W. Bush from bombing Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. At the time, the channel was not just widely mistrusted, but positively hated by the President’s entourage for being invariably the first to receive and broadcast taped messages from Osama Bin Laden. Donald Rumsfeld, for one, is credited for describing its coverage of US operations in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004 as “vicious”.

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