The show is over for another week and Faisal al-Qassem, the hottest property in Arab TV, emerges from the basement studio with his guests.
There is no hospitality suite at al-Jazeera TV, so he commandeers the editor-in-chief’s office, where there is just about enough room for three people to spread out and relax. Someone enters with a tray of coffee, trips and spills it.
Long before the Qatar-based satellite channel scooped the world’s media with its exclusive footage of the Afghan War and a succession of tapes from Osama bin Laden, it was Qassem’s Tuesday night show, The Opposite Direction, that drew in tens of millions of Arab viewers.
Qassem is an unlikely star. Wearing spectacles, and with his hair combed sideways to minimise the bald spots, he looks more like a university lecturer, and the formula for The Opposite Direction is so basic that most TV stations would never dream of making it their flagship programme.
For 75 minutes Qassem sits at a table strewn with papers, while his two guests argue. But it is not what the BBC would call a studio discussion. The protagonists shout, gesticulate and try to drown each other out. On occasions, they have even stormed out. In the control room above the studio, it takes five people, working frenetically, to keep the flailing arms in shot.
Viewers join in with phone calls and e-mails. The calls are not filtered and there is no time-delay to protect against abusive language. It’s all live, anything can happen — and it frequently does. Qassem himself once remarked on air that all Arab leaders are bastards: the furore lasted for weeks.
The secret of the show’s popularity, he says, is that it breaks all the Arab world’s taboos. ”We tackle the most sensitive issues, be they political, religious, social, cultural or economic. We were the first to do a hot debate on secularism and Islam. In the past, in the Arab world, you couldn’t even talk about the price of fish, because that might endanger national security as far as the security services were concerned.”
The lengths some authorities go to in order to hit back are astonishing. In Egypt, they once dragged Qassem’s brother — a pop star — out of his home in his pyjamas and bundled him on a plane to Jordan.
”In Algiers,” Qassem says, ”they cut off the electricity supply so that people could not watch the programme because we were talking about the military generals and how they are wasting the money of Algerians.”
In the seven years since it was founded by a decree from the Emir of Qatar as the Arab world’s first independent-minded news and current affairs channel, al-Jazeera has earned a reputation that inspires love and hate in almost equal measures.
Its motto, emblazoned in Arabic on the station’s publicity brochure, is ”al-ra’i … wal ra’i al-akhr [opinion … and the other opinion]”. That has not stopped critics from calling it the Bin Laden channel, although they forget that it also broke new ground in Arab TV by interviewing Israeli politicians.
Now, with war in Iraq looming, some are beginning to call it the Saddam Hussein channel.
”Yes,” says Mohamed Jasem al-Ali, managing director, ”we are Bin Laden’s channel, we are Saddam’s channel. We are the CIA’s channel, Mossad’s channel — all of them. I mean … we are following the news and the news is coming from Saddam Hussein and [the United States] at the moment.”
Al-Jazeera made its name in the West — not to mention a tidy sum of money — from footage of the Afghan War and it’s hoping to do the same in the expected conflict with Iraq. In Afghanistan, it was the only station with a permanent base in Kabul, but this time the battle for scoops could be tougher.
”Our competition is the American TV news networks,” Ali says. ”Who’s going to get the exclusive pictures?”
Despite its scantier resources — al-Jazeera has 755 employees worldwide against CNN’s 4 000 — he thinks the Arab station may still have the edge. ”In Iraq we know the language, we know the mentality. It’s very easy for us to find out things and move around there.”
The channel’s reputation among ordinary Arabs, together with anti-American sentiment in the region, could, in theory, provide better access — though in war reporting, much depends on luck and being in the right place at the right time.
Al-Jazeera has also had discussions with the US and the British authorities about facilities to cover war in Iraq from a Western viewpoint, as well as an Arab one. Some of its staff have taken part in official war training courses for journalists in the US.
This is part of a developing relationship with non-Arab governments that began, less than a month after the September 11 attacks, with a half-hour interview given by Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street, his London home.
Blair was among the first to recognise the controversial channel as a perfect vehicle for talking directly to a large Arab and Muslim audience. American officials, notably National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, quickly followed suit —though some of their appearances have been juxtaposed (balanced?) with hostile film clips or commentary.
In the expected conflict with Iraq, while Arab governments may demur, the United Kingdom and the US will be making their case to the millions of al-Jazeera viewers at every opportunity.
Hoping to get off to a flying start in Iraq, Ali and Qassem travelled to Baghdad a few weeks ago in search of a blockbuster interview with Saddam Hussein. Despite tales of visitors being washed in disinfectant and ordered not to shake hands, Saddam not only shook hands but hugged them. ”You are making a lot of trouble,” he told them, ”but it’s good.”
There was no blockbuster interview, however. After 15 minutes of filming, the Iraqi leader changed his mind and the rest of their two-hour talk continued off-camera — although he did give them some advice about political survival. ”You can always benefit from listening to people,” he said. ”A shepherd with a herd of goats can give you many ideas. Listen to people. Any leader who didn’t listen to his people would fall from power.”
Apart from being scooped by former Labour MP Tony Benn in securing what could be the last-ever TV interview with Saddam, al-Jazeera also faces logistical problems.
Its offices in Kuwait and Jordan — two crucial countries in any war with Iraq — have been forcibly closed by the authorities there. Saad al-Anisi, the Kuwait bureau chief, now wanders the Qatar newsroom looking a bit lost. He’s forbidden to talk to the press, but a member of staff grumbles: ”It’s always the supposedly liberal regimes that do these things.”
It has happened so many times in different countries that Jihad Ballout, head of media relations, reckons he can now predict when a closure is coming. First the government plants nasty stories about al-Jazeera in the local newspapers, he says, then the secret police start tailing reporters, making it obvious that they’re doing so.
Besides facing the vagaries of Arab states, al-Jazeera is also fearful of what
the Americans might do to it in Iraq. During the Afghan War, two supposedly smart US bombs hit its office in Kabul and many suspect the attack was no accident. It happened at a strategic moment, just two hours before the Northern Alliance took over the city.
”We had put cameras on the roof to cover the whole of Kabul when the Northern Alliance took over,” Ali says. ”Later, we sent a letter to the Pentagon asking why they bombed our office and we got a funny reply saying they didn’t know al-Jazeera had an office in Kabul. For the whole war, they knew it was there. It was the only source of information except for the CIA.”
This time, the station is taking no chances. ”We’re giving the Americans the coordinates of our office in Baghdad and also the code of our signal to the satellite transponder,” Ali says. ”We will try to give the Americans the whole information about where we are in Baghdad, so there will be no excuse for bombing us. But we are worried.”
For al-Jazeera, covering war in Iraq well is not just a matter of journalistic kudos. There are business considerations, too. The station was funded for the first five years by the Emir of Qatar but is now required to pay its own way. Sales of film from the Afghan War to other TV channels have helped to keep it in the black and it needs more revenue of the sort that might be provided by a conflict in Iraq.
One problem it faces is that, despite its huge audience, some major advertisers operate an undeclared boycott. ”Advertising in the Middle East is not based on the commercial, it is based on the political,” Ali says.
He won’t be drawn into giving details but others blame Saudi influence and moves by the Gulf Cooperation Council against the channel.
While some of this is the result of its content, al-Jazeera’s relationship with the Qatari government also makes it a sitting duck in squabbles between regional states.
Another source of revenue that could be tapped is the al-Jazeera brand, probably one of the most valuable in the Middle East. There was talk of a tobacco company marketing al-Jazeera cigarettes — although that idea has been dropped. Branded sunglasses might be a safer option, marketing staff suggest.
Al-Jazeera’s headquarters is pretty small. The squat, blue-roofed building in Doha is dwarfed by surrounding palm trees, satellite dishes and transmission masts. ”All this trouble from a matchbox like this,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak once exclaimed when he arrived to take a look.
The main newsroom, with 70 or so work stations, measures about 13,5m in each direction. On the far wall, for some unfathomable reason, between banks of TV screens, is a giant 18th-century map of the world with the unexplored parts of Canada and Australia missing.
In the managing director’s office, about 50 TV award trophies line windowsills — testimony to al-Jazeera’s achievements over the past seven years and also, unfortunately, to the weakness of other Arabic channels.
But managing director Ali’s eyes are not set on his Arab rivals. There’s a framed cover story from the The Guardian‘s G2 section about al-Jazeera and the war in Afghanistan. Its headline says: ”’Who needs CNN?”
Soon, he hopes — later this year or early in 2004 — al-Jazeera will launch an English-language channel to compete with the big guys. Not just translations, but ”a totally English service with English reporters and presenters that can build a bridge between East and West”.
The Americans, he says, are watching only one perspective of the news. ”What we will try to do is give another perspective.”
It’s an ambitious — perhaps over ambitious — plan that will pit tiny
al-Jazeera against the might of the BBC, CNN, ABC, Fox and others, and perhaps tame its wilder excesses in the process.
The coffee spill has been mopped up and the two guests from Qassem’s shouting match who, only a few minutes earlier, seemed about to come to blows in the studio, are sitting side by side, chatting amiably and smiling. So why couldn’t they just talk normally for the viewers?
”When you are facing the television cameras, you are in the business of showbusiness,” Qassem says.
”I think the programme has been successful mainly because of its combative style. We used to discuss politics in the Arab world in a very servile and frightened way. Now, for the first time ever, we can raise our voices and shout. Why not?” —Â