Welcome Al Jazeera!

Welcome Al Jazeera!

What a treat it is to receive Al Jazeera English on the Tata Sky bouquet at last! Every time it comes on though, one is reminded of the hazards of too much balancing of the books. And also some of its perhaps unintended benefits.

 We have had two Reliances for a while now, the combined enterprise value of which is quite a bit bigger than the unbroken entity used to be. And it came about because the former monolithic entity was too restrictive for the ambitions and talents of two very admirable prime-movers.

And Al Jazeera , started in 1996 in the aftermath of the closure of the BBC’s Arabic Service, is now well established in its own right, in English, Arabic, and on the Internet. It echoes some of the BBC’s style, manned as it is with many of its ex-staffers, but some say it outperforms the original, despite the same DNA. This is possibly because of its robust and red blooded journalistic tone. And this, while the progenitor, some say the original, feels watery, wheezy and out of condition in comparison.

Mukesh Ambani’s alleged despotism after the demise of his legendary father Mr. Dhirubhai Ambani, apparently spawned the break-out by younger sibling Anil Ambani. And Mrs. Thatcher’s alleged hatchet job on “Aunty Beeb’s” finances begat Al Jazeera.  

Of course, in the early days of the nineties, Al Jazeera faced not a little dithering on the part of its originally Saudi backers who could not stomach a potentially critical programme on the Kingdom. And proportionate sagacity, courage and ambition on the part of the present ruler of  Qatar who picked up the gauntlet when the Saudis backed out.

The Emir of Qatar has in fact broken the mould on media freedom in the Middle East characterised by tame, often state-owned and run propagandist media, till Al Jazeera came of age with live coverage of the war in Afghanistan post 9/11. 

The interesting thing is that the channel does not do a CNN style potted and self conscious look tinged with expatriate brio, at Arabia, or India, or Afghanistan for that matter. On the contrary, it comments with great aplomb and considerable professionalism on the goings on all around the world. It is also not a mouthpiece for Al Qaeda or its radical Islamic offshoots, as some if its nervous competitors would have us believe, though it didn’t hesitate to give the late and unlamented Osama a fair amount of balanced play.

CNN, the original pathfinder for 24x7 global news and views from 1980,  grew weary along the way, somewhere after all that brilliant reporting and firework display visuals of the first Gulf War of 1991 in President Bush the Elder’s time. It changed and became middle-aged, particularly after its acquisition by forces such as Time Warner and AOL, “suits”, who were quite a bit different from the pioneering, visionary, maverick and entrepreneurial Ted Turner.

BBC meanwhile has now settled into antiquated dowagerism with its blanket spread over its knees style, a piece with the transitional licence fee fed radio-TV era, emanating whiffs of a British Empire mindset long gone.

The world has changed a great deal in cultural, political and point-of-view terms since the epoch of Britannia’s rule of the waves, its quixotic solar topeed dominance enforced by artillery, the Thin Red Line and the stiff upper lip. That sort of caricature poseurism has gone to the tome and coffee table books, available to nostalgia buffs and the current day fans of an outdated idea.

Imperialism, all the rage in the 18^th and 19^th centuries with its talk of “the White man’s burden”, and other constructs and Empires further back, has always been a pernicious idea. It was designed to beggar the imagination and exclude all that is inconvenient to its tentacular hubris. And on the ground, it has ruthlessly exploited most of its subject populations.

In comparison, it is indeed refreshing to hear about the fortunes of the Montpelier football team, one from a historic city in Southern France, and that of Paraguay in the Al Jazeera Sports News coverage. It comes replete with news of on-field scuffles just like the best of the best from Britain and Germany.

These sorts of countries and cities do not normally pass muster as worth talking about on most Western channels. With much that supported their eminence having fallen away, they still persist in an arrogant navel-gazing that defines the edges of their own world. Compared to this implicit racism and insularity, Al Jazeera, which literally means “The Island”, is a British-trained breath of fresh air set free by the Emir of Qatar and his people.

More than one reputable media watching analyst from the Western bastions has identified the channel for its quality. We may benefit, for example, from accessing our inputs on the second round of elections to select the French President or the ongoing and intensifying drama between Sudan and South Sudan from Al Jazeera. This, rather than BBC or CNN, let alone our own relatively under-funded channel feeds.  

America, for example, does not particularly cover South America, preferring to ignore an entire continent, except within a subtly derogatory frame of reference. The European media too follows a similar West-centric world view that tends to render the trials and tribulations, the hopes and fears of much of the rest of the world, somehow unimportant, even irrelevant.

A Middle Eastern base for a beacon of non-imperial journalism of high quality such as Al Jazeera is most useful in today’s world with its relentless shift of power. The power is moving towards BRICS, more particularly to China, and to a lesser extent, to India.

 India is often pressured to toe the US line as a major geopolitical presence in South Asia that cannot be permitted too much leeway. But Qatar is not strategically that important despite its substantial gas and petroleum assets proportionate to its tininess. It can therefore play the 24x7 Nightingale without some insomniac reaching for his rifle.

A current cameo, that of the blind Chinese dissident Chen, wimpishly handled with less than unwavering support by the US Embassy in China, is illustrative.  Chen walked out on his exploration of US asylum when his family on the outside in Chinese hands was threatened. The days of gun boat diplomacy are long gone. Today, the US, despite being the world’s indisputably preeminent military and economic power, cannot afford to annoy or embarrass China. It is Chinese cooperation in bilateral and multilateral contexts that has become crucial to America. See it all on the feisty channel from Qatar.

 (1,098 words)

May 3^rd, 2012

Gautam Mukherjee