al-Jazeera: Can it work?

Presidential Room Five, Sheraton Hotel, Doha. The doyen of chat-show hosts has just flown in to Qatar and, for once, it is his turn to face the interviewers’ questions. Hello and welcome to Sir David Frost. When al-Jazeera, the Arabic station famous for broadcasting Osama bin Laden tapes, launches its English-language sister channel, Frost will be hosting a one-hour show loosely modelled on his long-running BBC television show, Breakfast With Frost.

‘It’s a real adventure,” he says, lighting an inch-thick cigar. ‘I’ve always liked to be where the new frontiers are, and this is very much a new frontier. It’s probably the last great 24-hour news network that will be set up, and so the challenge was immediately of interest to me.

‘Obviously I wanted to check that there were no links at all between al-Jazeera Arabic and al-Qaeda and terror. Al-Jazeera got an instant clean bill of health, both in London and in Washington.”

Frost will not be presenting his show from Qatar, the super-rich Gulf state where al-Jazeera is based and funded by the emir, but from its British outpost at one of the most impressive addresses in London: No 1 Knightsbridge.

But life at al-Jazeera was not always so comfortable. During the Afghan war in 2001, two American ‘smart” bombs destroyed its office in Kabul. In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the United States hit its office in Baghdad, killing a journalist. And, according to reports last year, it was only the efforts of Prime Minister Tony Blair — and perhaps the fact that Qatar is a US ally — that dissuaded President George W Bush from obliterating the station’s Doha headquarters.

Long before Washington hawks denounced it as a ‘terror channel”, though, al-Jazeera had been rank-ling Arab governments. Launched in 1996, it brought a new style of journalism to the Middle East, breaking taboos and reporting opposing views instead of just the official line.

It is this ground-breaking spirit that al-Jazeera International (AJI) hopes to recapture with its English broadcasts later this year. ‘How you see something depends very much on where you’re sitting,” said MD Nigel Parsons. ‘We’ll be looking at events through different spectacles.”

With 30 nationalities in a news team of more than 200, the aim is to ‘let Africans tell us about Africa, and so on”, he said. During the course of a day, AJI will broadcast for four hours from Kuala Lumpur, 11 from Doha, five from London and four from Washington. Each team will determine its own news agenda.

‘In each centre, you’re getting a different perspective,” says Steve Clark, director of news, who spent 19 years at ITV. He promises ‘exclusive stories from parts of the world that people aren’t getting access to”, and to cover developing countries in a completely different way. ‘There’s more to Africa than Aids, famine and war.”

Veronica Pedrosa, the news anchor in Kuala Lumpur and a previous employee of CNN, talks of focusing on ‘stories that CNN wouldn’t touch”.

These are high ideals, but it is the sort of coverage that many channels shy away from on the grounds of cost, difficulty or lack of viewer interest. AJI chiefs insist they can deliver the goods and pull in the viewers. Asked for examples of ‘different” news, they declined to talk about specifics ahead of the launch. A couple of their journalists, however, after being promised strict confidentiality, did describe stories they are working on that seem to fit the bill.

AJI has signed award-winning broadcaster Rageh Omaar to present Witness, a programme ‘featuring human stories made by storytellers from all walks of life”. Would-be contributors can offer their stories through the website www.ajicommissioning.net.

Over at the Arabic channel, there are dark but anonymous murmurings. Some complain of being sidelined and not consulted about AJI. What many wrongly expected to be ‘the voice of Arabs” in English has turned into a far more international project, with less of a focus on the Middle East. They complain about the number of British people involved and, in a region that loves conspiracy theories, some imagine the old empire is striking back.

Nonsense, says Parsons: 33% of the senior people are Arabs and among the 10 news presenters in Doha three are Arab, three Pakistani and two British. ‘It’s a very fair mix.”

At the Sheraton, meanwhile, Frost is mulling over the people he would like to interview. ‘Fidel Castro has always eluded me,” he says. ‘It was 30 years ago that I started trying to get him; we must go for Castro. He’s not going to remain head of Cuba for much longer.” —