Even for a news organisation that frequently makes the headlines itself, last year was a rollercoaster ride for the Al-Jazeera satellite television station. The big question for 2004 is whether, in the fallout from the Iraq war, it will buckle under pressure to tone down what critics say is its remorselessly anti-US output.
With tens of millions of regular viewers in the Arab world, the Qatar-based station has revolutionised journalism in the middle east. Yet its launch in 1996 happened almost by accident, the result of a terminated contract between Orbit radio and television service, funded by Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, and the BBC’s Arabic Television venture. In the 1990s the al-Saud family bought up almost the entire Arabic-language media in both the west and the middle east and signed a deal with the BBC to broadcast its channel. But it was discomforted by the editorial independence shown by the BBC, the like of which the Arab world had not witnessed before. The final straw was a documentary the channel broadcast about public beheadings in Saudi Arabia. Only 20 months after signing the deal, the Saudis pulled out of the joint venture.
At just that time, the emir of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, was setting up Al-Jazeera. He originally envisaged it as a means of enhancing the international reputation of his country, which even most other Arabs considered an irrelevance. Al-Jazeera was quietly able to recruit most of the BBC-trained Arab journalists who had been left jobless after the collapse of the Saudi venture. It inherited not only the staff of the former BBC network but also its style, content and free spirit.
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