Al Jazeera Buys a U.S. Cable Channel

Struggling to gain a foothold in U.S. cable TV markets, the sometimes controversial Arabic Al Jazeera network in January 2013 paid $500 million for a struggling cable channel, Current TV, founded by former Vice President Al Gore. Earning $70 million in the deal, Gore was criticized at the time for selling out to a news service largely funded by Arab oil money. Gore, of course, had made his reputation taking on climate change issues and lecturing about the overdependence of the United States on foreign oil.

Even after all the U.S. interest in the 2011 Arab Spring movement (uprisings by Arab peoples against dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen among other Middle Eastern countries), Al Jazeera English aired on cable or satellite systems in the United States in only Burlington, VT; Toledo, OH; and Washington, DC, reaching about 100,000 homes in 2012. This lack of audience access to Arab and Middle East news led Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report to question Al Jazeera’s Cairo correspondent on why the network couldn’t get on U.S. TV systems when there was clearly room for “17 Showtimes and a channel for pets.”¹

Al Jazeera’s battle to get on U.S. cable systems stemmed from early condemnations “by the American government for broadcasting videotapes from Osama bin Laden and other material deemed terrorist propaganda.”² With the purchase of Current TV, the Arabic news network still faced concerns from some cable operators saying they wouldn’t carry a remade Current TV channel if it was not providing some kind of news service that audiences wanted. The original plan in launching Al Jazeera America (AJA) was to offer about 60 percent of its programming from the United States with the remaining news coming from the existing news service, Al Jazeera English, based in Doha, Qatar.³ AJA, however, responding to U.S concerns and worried about access to cable and DBS systems, revised that plan so they would look more like Fox News or CNN. They also decided to add some eight hundred employees at a time when many U.S. news outlets were still downsizing—providing a “giant stimulus project for American journalism.” According to business reporter Ali Velshi, who left CNN to work for AJA: “This is the first big journalism hiring binge that anyone’s been on for a long time.”⁴ Today the main Al Jazeera Arabic network, which began in 1996 and is heavily subsidized by the emir of Qatar, reaches 220 million TV households in more than a hundred countries and runs news bureaus in nearly seventy countries (compared to CNN’s thirty-three).

Still, some critics remain suspicious of Al Jazeera, although its English reporting staff draws on journalists from fifty different nations, including many Americans. Even in the midst of some Arab regimes trying to ban Al Jazeera’s news coverage and with the network receiving worldwide praise for its comprehensive coverage of Arab Spring, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly labeled the network “anti-American.”⁵ Still, during the early days of Egypt’s protest against their once-entrenched dictator, four million people logged on to Al Jazeera’s Web site to see 24/7 video coverage of the uprising, including 1.6 million hits in the United States.⁶

In a world increasingly interconnected and centered on the Middle East, before AJA’s arrival most U.S. citizens had no cable or satellite access to the world’s main Arab news services. While TV executives have claimed that there is lots of competition for too few channels, a more likely scenario is that cable/satellite chiefs have feared backlash if they supported an Arab news service on their systems. First Amendment scholar and Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, however, has called on the FCC to “use its authority to expand access to foreign news bureaus.” Failing to do so, Bollinger argues, “threatens to put America’s understanding of the world at a significant disadvantage relative to other countries.”⁷