A fascinating article in The Sunday Times last weekend about a very different kind of missionary – Al-Jazeera.

We all know the bare bones of the story: launched as Arabic-language news channel in 96, then in English in 2006, and spotlit suddenly on the world stage when they were the sole recipients of Bin Laden’s videos after 9/11. What was interesting about the article was its analysis of how and why they have built a brand and product that has increased its English Language internet viewership 2,500% since the Tunisian uprising started.

This is Sami Zeidan, one of their key news presenters: ‘Al-Jazeera isn’t a job, it’s a mission. ..perhaps even a like a religion. Before Al-Jazeera was launched, information was coming really from one direction, from the north to the south, from the developed world to the developing. It was one-sided. You can’t blame the West for that. It simply got its act together and developed more sophisticated forms of communication. But now there are some parts of the world that are trying to redress the balance’. Hence its slogan: ‘The opinion and the other opinion’. (Source: The Eye of The Storm, by John Arlidge, The Sunday Times Magazine, 13.03. 2011)

And in this spirit, if some in the West feel Al-Jazeera lacks impartiality, the station levels the same charge at the West, noting that in the Western media’s coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan they have failed to ask the ‘tough questions’ about their leaders and governments, and sanitised much of the trauma of the past few years.

But clearly the channel is different not simply in its point of view. The nature of its news coverage (coverage of casualties is so graphic that one of the presenters frequently has to turn away from the screen – ‘ I often think that is it a horror show that I am about to present’). It makes much greater use of citizen journalism , and in particular mobile-phone video shot by protestors or spectators – without, its critics argue, sufficient checking on the sources before they do so. Its constant streaming of coverage of key locations, such as Tahrir Square, in effect encourages protestors to stay there, leading to Al-Jazeera becoming an active catalyst of protest, rather than a commentator of it. And this lack of detachment is echoed by the emotional involvement of its presenters, some of whom have been moved to tears on screen, and protestors carrying Al-Jazeera presenters on their shoulders, as if leaders in the revolution, rather than simply spectators.
Yet this involvement, the article notes, runs throughout all its coverage. It was the first to show live interviews with Israeli leaders, previously not done on Arab stations, and leans hard into controversial stories about the Arab world, even if they show elements of it in a bad light – as with The Palestinian Papers.

Al-Jazeera means ‘The Island’, because it is built on a traffic island known as TV Roundabout in Doha – a building dismissed by the deposed Mubarak as a ‘little matchbox’. And it is an island on a mission: ‘we are promoting peaceful protest and the cause of human rights and democracy’, in the words of Mostefa Souag, the director of news. And , like many a challenger before it, it polarises opinions, though not in the ways one might think – while Gaddafi dismisses them as ‘dogs’, Hilary Clinton has this to say: It’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you are getting real news around the clock. Al-Jazeera has been the leader in literally changing people’s minds and attitudes’.

A great article on an influential challenger.