Like Three Peas in Pod
I moved to Doha, Qatar in January of this year for work. There are three English-language international news networks on the cable package at my place- CNN International, BBC World, and Al-Jazeera's International (AJI), an English service whose local offices I drive past everyday.
While I don't speak Arabic, one thing seems certain: AJI is not just a translated re-broadcast of the Arabic one. It has studios in London and Doha and it produces much of its content for a global English-speaking audience independently from the Arabic service.
A good deal of that audience is patently anti-American, to be sure, and my guess is that all three of the aforementioned networks are competing for primacy among that segment.
That having been said, one shouldn't get the impression that every story on AJI is either an anti-American, anti-Bush hit piece or a pro-Al-Qaeda or pro-Jihadi puff piece. It isn’t the Bash-America-all-the-time network. A more apt description would be The Needle- Them-All-of-the-Time Network. That way no one thinks you are an American stooge or suckup. On the other hand, too much and too harsh of a needling and no self-respecting American official or pro-American Arab will appear on the network. It's a fine line: you have to needle them just enough so that they want to come on and give their side of the story or defend certain actions and policies, not so much that they dismiss you out of hand as hacks.
And in this regard, that’s what's so remarkable about AJE: I can hardly tell the difference between it and CNNi or BBC World. All three have attractive and articulate native English speakers as program hosts. (The photo on the right is of an "Al-Jazeera Aussie") All three have bureaus around the world with correspondents filing reports on topics of general interest, not just politics and war. All three are capable of providing a means by which world leaders and opinion-makers can reach hundreds of millions of English-speaking viewers world-wide. And as English becomes more widely accepted as the world's most important second language I can only foresee the audience for these three networks continuing to grow.
But that raises a question of strategy, especially that of critical differentiation. To my eyes and ears, the 3 networks are very similar in style, content, and scope. It is not clear to me that their target audience needs three look-alike, sound-alike, biased-alike global news networks.
One scenario is that one of the three attempts to differentiate itself from the others on some key dimension, thereby lessening the degree of direct rivalry among them. What that dimension is, I can't predict. But one possibility is that they vie with one another to be seen as the most stridently anti-American. There are some obvious pitfalls to such a strategy and I don't realistically expect to see it followed for long or with great success.
A second and perhaps more likely outcome stems from the failure of BBC World, CNNi and AJE to be “up front” (as Wretchard said) about their biases. Not doing so could be an act of cynicism (i.e. they know they’re biased but the won’t admit it) or one of blindness (they won’t admit it because they don’t know). Either way, such behavior leaves wide open the gate for entry onto the playing field by a fourth competitor, one that tacks closer to the center of the world political opinion, thereby gaining a bigger audience and more ad revenue. This would be roughly similar to how ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN created the conditions for the entry and eventual success of the Fox News Channel.
For the time being and into the foreseeable future, people outside of the US will continue to speak about the US and international news networks like AJI and BBC are important actors in global conversation. But what they say, why and how they say it, and to whom they say it- these are far from settled questions.
Links: Carnival of the Insanities at Dr. Sanity