Letter from the Editor TBS

The Al Jazeera Television Network captures the attention of those interested in Arabic-language satellite television broadcasting like nothing else. Approximately half the articles submitted to Transnational Broadcasting Studies over the past two issues were about Al Jazeera. To some degree this is understandable. The network is important and influential. Observers claimed an "Al Jazeera effect" as early as the late 1990s, though it was a rather different "effect" than the one many Americans were writing about a few years later. In the late 1990s, many an academic conference in the US promoted Al Jazeera as the Great White Hope of civil society in the Middle East. Even then, I suspect there was a considerable gap between what Americans and Europeans were seeing on their screens, and what Arab viewers saw. Initially, Americans saw Al Jazeera as more truthful because it dared to broadcast debates and to criticize Arab governments. The "Al Jazeera effect" was putatively to spread such truthfulness to other stations, and, as the reach of satellite broadcasting extended to more and more homes, to the social grassroots. But all along there was another "Al Jazeera effect." It was to break the news monopoly of the Western media. That was certainly the operative "effect" in my first encounter with Al Jazeera, which came before the satellite dish had penetrated deeply into the Egyptian market, and long before 9/11 changed the dynamic of discourse on Al Jazeera. An Al Jazeera broadcast was playing in the house of an Egyptian film director to whom I paid a visit in 1997. He was positively gleeful about Al Jazeera, and told me proudly that he had switched off CNN. He was very clear about his reason for the switch: It was largely because he saw the new station as reporting from an Arab perspective, and not because he endorsed its debates or criticisms of Arab governments.