Could the Arab sheiks save journalism?

IT ALWAYS seemed improbable that Arab sheiks could save journalism.

But in a business as troubled as t American television news, hope springs eternal, and the Al Jazeera network out of Qatar seemed to offer an opulent oasis.

In January, with great fanfare, it acquired the floundering Current TV network from Al Gore and his partners for some $500m (€388.8m). Then it announced it would replace Current with Al Jazeera America hire about 800 people in the US. More than 22,000 applied. Headhunting for top executives goes on.

But plans to launch Al Jazeera America this summer have stalled, and insiders suggest it will be lucky if it airs before autumn, or even by the end of the year. “I just don’t know if we are ready,” one said earlier this month. “It is such a big thing.”

Over the last week, old questions about Al Jazeera’s supposed anti-Israel bias erupted with a vengeance, and a twist. Its English-language website published — then pulled — an essay by Columbia University history professor Joseph Massad asserting that Zionism and European anti-Semitism were essentially two sides of the same coin. It wasn’t exactly a riveting read.

The fact that Al Jazeera executives, who love to talk about speaking truth to power, kept mum as they quietly took the essay off their site infuriated fans who look to the English-language network for wide-open debate as well as wide-ranging coverage.

I’ve been following the ups and downs of Al Jazeera America all year, and it’s still a good guess that its pockets are too deep for it to fail.

It will go on the air sometime in the not-too-dim future. And it will bring a lot of fresh energy as well as controversy to the news scene in the world’s most important television market. It could transform the way we see news. But, it could be a disaster in almost every sense of the word.

Soon after the announcement of the Current TV deal in January, I talked to Marwan Bishara, host of a monthly programme on Al Jazeera English called Empire that covers the good, the bad, the ugly, and the paradoxical aspects of US global dominance.

Bishara was frankly excited about the push into the US. “I don’t think any other society is capable of producing as much news and noise as America,” he said. “Our challenge is to put America back in television: The America that’s between New York and Los Angeles. Right now, I don’t see those Americans on television. I see elites. I see comedians. I see pundits. I see politicians.”

Amjad Atallah, formerly of the left-leaning New America Foundation and now the network’s bureau chief for the Americas, struck that same theme. “Our narrative has been to be the voice of the voiceless,” he said.

“That runs through all the channels we have. If all we do is cover the spin doctors and have them repeat their talking points each day ad nauseam we won’t have done a service for anyone.”

To get real news out of the real Americas, north and south, Al Jazeera plans to open bureaus in Chicago, Detroit, and perhaps 10 other cities.

All of this sounds highly laudable, badly needed, and a long way from the Al Jazeera that was dubbed terrorist TV” during the George W. Bush administration. Back then, Al Jazeera was, among other things, a vehicle for members of al-Qaeda to speak their version of truth to power.

The change has been evolutionary, not revolutionary. And it’s important to trace the family tree. Al Jazeera in Arabic was once a mouthpiece for al-Qaeda and has always been close to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Al Jazeera English, which started broadcasting in 2006, now claims to reach 260m households in more than 130 countries. It has become the premier world news network actually covering the news of the world.

Six years ago, Al Jazeera English sent correspondent Josh Rushing to report on small-town America. A federal agent followed as he travelled through North Dakota. Rushing is a former US Marine lieutenant, but the agent interviewed everybody Rushing spoke to, trying to find out if Rushing was a terrorist scouting targets near the Canadian border. That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore.

BUT Al Jazeera’s surge into the US won’t come cheap. Billions of dollars are at stake, and won’t be earned back soon or ever. “So, what’s in it for Qatar?” I asked executive producer Bob Wheelock. There was a sharp pause at the other end of the conference call. “That’s above our pay grade,” he said.

Something much bigger is going on here, much more disruptive if you will, than the expansion of a cable news franchise. Qatar is famously rich.

The wealth of its ruling family is almost unfathomable. Per capita income is over $100,000 a year, the highest in the world. But perhaps because the money is recent and the country is a hot, sandy peninsula, the world has been slow to recognise just how grand are its imperial designs.

“The future of Qatar is soft power,” says Mohamed Al Kuwari, its ambassador in Paris. And the leaders of the royal Al Thani family have figured out just what it takes to project themselves and their country onto the global stage in the 21st century.

They may be members of the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam, like the Saudis, but they have a wide-open worldview. The key figures are the emir, Hamad Bin Khalifa; his favourite wife, Sheikha Moza; their son, Crown Prince Tamim; and their daughter Mayassa, “arguably the most powerful woman in the art world”, according to Forbes.

Along with their cousin, the shrewd Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, who is both foreign minister and prime minister (and would fit the mythical role of grand vizier), the family has used the media, sports, culture, education, diplomacy, and covert action with stunning effect.

This is a country that has commercial relations with Israel yet gives enthusiastic political support to Hamas: The emir himself paid a unprecedented official visit to Gaza in October.

While Al Jazeera was broadcasting coverage critical of the Iraq invasion in 2003, Qatar was hosting the headquarters of the US military’s Central Command. While Doha has worked for good relations with Iran, it has also let the Americans build enormous bases on its little peninsula.

In Europe, Qatar has become a major presence from the bourses to the working-class suburbs. In Britain, it bought Harrods, the Olympic village, and 15% of the London Stock Exchange. In Germany, it has put major money into Volkswagen, Porsche, and other industrial giants.

In France, Qataris have bought and refurbished the Royal Monceau Hotel in Paris and the Martinez in Cannes. They also have invested heavily in the French stock market, and theoretically they could turn the CAC 40 on its head any time they might choose.

Doha’s influence has been apparent at the highest levels of government, as it worked with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to free Bulgarian nurses held in Libya in 2007, then supported his decision to go to war to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Relations with president François Hollande are almost as close and, in line with the socialist president’s political needs, Qatar is funding a foundation to benefit small businesses in the ghettoised housing projects on the outskirts of French cities.

When soccer star David Beckham decided to play part of last season for Paris Saint-Germain, he was moving to a Qatari-owned team. And when he sits in the stands to watch the 2022 World Cup, he will brave the heat of Doha, which beat the US, South Korea, and Australia to host the most watched sporting event in the world.

But the biggest focus of Qatari largesse and intrigue has been in the Middle East since the upheaval of the Arab Spring began in early 2011. “What Qatar would like to see is stability all around it,” said Al Kuwari, “to create an atmosphere of hope for everybody in the region.”

On that front, however, the record has not been good. When dictators ruled the region, Al Jazeera’s coverage spoke for the masses. But since the Arab Spring began, it has identified so closely with the Muslim Brotherhood bidding to take and hold power that many viewers came to see Al Jazeera as hopelessly biased — and so did several staffers in Europe and the Middle East, who simply resigned.

“It quickly became clear to employees: This is about politics, not about journalism,” wrote Al Jazeera Berlin correspondent Aktham Suliman after he quit last year. “More precisely, about Qatari foreign policy, which had subtly started to employ Al Jazeera as a tool to praise friends and attack enemies.”

If so, the course of events in the region has not been kind to Qatar’s strategy. “Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood has caused crowds in the Arab Spring states to burn the Qatari flag over the past few weeks,” says Sultan al-Qassemi, a political commentator based in UAE.

Like many other empires, Qatar’s began as a matter of self-defence. In the early 1990s, this little emirate found itself under mounting pressure from intimidating neighbours.

Construction of enormous liquid natural gas export facilities continued even as Hamad ousted his father in a bloodless coup in 1995, and even before the LNG started shipping in 1997 the money started flooding in. Hamad used the cash to make sure people would hear about Qatar, remember it, and like it or not, respect it.

To that end, the Al Jazeera Arabic satellite television network launched in 1996. From the beginning, it gave other Arab governments fits. Its talk shows dropped the traditional language of insinuation used in the region’s opaque news reports, replacing it with unvarnished name-calling and dramatic on-scene coverage. Angry Arab regimes frequently expelled its correspondents, but rarely for long.

When a new and bloody Palestinian uprising began in 2000, Arabic speakers turned to Al Jazeera for coverage of the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel.

It was about the only Arab network that invited Israelis to give their side of the story. But on the second day, a French network filmed an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohamed Al Durra, cowering behind his father in Gaza as they were caught in a crossfire.

The boy was shot and killed, and Al Jazeera rebroadcast the controversial footage again and again, turning it into an icon of the intifada.

Qatar’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots has been part of its identity from the beginning. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Islamic scholar and firebrand, became a superstar on Al Jazeera Arabic.

His support for Palestinian attacks on Israelis has been unrelenting and sometimes blood-curdling: “Oh, Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people... Kill them, down to the very last one,” he said on air in 2009, channelling Arab passions at the height of a relentless Israeli assault on Gaza that killed more than 1,000 Palestinians. The masses responded.

When Al-Qaradawi returned to Egypt after the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011, as many as 2m people reportedly turned out to hear him lead prayers in Tahrir Square.

For the public perspective, the lingering doubts about Al Jazeera are linked to the Arabic channel’s coverage of al-Qaeda. And it certainly had good contacts. In late 2000 and early 2001, I was talking to intermediaries among the Islamists and jihadists in London (or Londonistan, as many called it), working to set up a meeting with Osama bin Laden.

One of the Saudis in Britain directed me to Al Jazeera’s Kabul correspondent, Tayseer Allouni, a Syrian Muslim Brother who’d been exiled in Spain and who lived there when not on assignment in Afghanistan.

We stayed in touch sporadically, but there was never any commitment for a meeting with the master terrorist. Then, after 9/11, bin Laden did give one major interview — to Allouni.

Allouni asked plenty of tough questions about the slaughter of innocents. You wouldn’t conclude it was a friendly interview. But Spanish courts eventually jailed Allouni for seven years for allegedly conveying funds to al-Qaeda. After his release from prison a year ago, Allouni returned to Doha.

What really drove the George W. Bush administration crazy about Al Jazeera Arabic, however, was its refusal to buy into the Iraq War.

In the heady days of “freedom fries” in the US, when Washington insisted anyone who questioned its policies must be siding with terrorists, Al Jazeera offered a compelling narrative diametrically opposed to what Americans were seeing on their networks. US television was all about victory; Al Jazeera was about the victims.

The incident with Massad’s anti-Semitism essay does not bode well, and it’s not encouraging to think that, if it had been published on Al Jazeera Arabic’s website, nobody would have blinked an eye.

But Al Jazeera America can do better than that, and very probably will, if it ever starts broadcasting.

* Christopher Dickey is Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor for Newsweek. (c) 2013 Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved.