Man, South Carolina has been great. The people here have been nice, the weather’s nice…” I wait for the “but” to come from David, the Al-Jazeera film editor, though it never arrives. We’d all been camped out at the bar at Mac’s on Main in Columbia on the night of the S.C. Democratic primaries, tallying the precinct numbers as they came in. Up on stage, the Electric Voodoo Blues Revue was winding down a cover of “Black Magic Woman,” the guitarist searing through a final solo, despite the fact that he’s missing his right hand.
“Plus,” David says putting his drink down to clap for the band, “you’ve got a lot of interesting characters here. You ought to see the lady who plays piano in the lounge at our hotel.”
Out on the sidewalk, camera lights flood an Al-Jazeera reporter while he interviews Michael Berg of the Carolina Peace Resource Center. After a moment, the producer, a Maryland-born MSNBC ex-pat in a blue hooded sweatshirt, signals the all clear and Berg races back down to the TV in Mac’s basement to look in on the poll numbers while the crew check their watches and file inside to stay warm between video feeds.
When we first learned these guys were from Al-Jazeera we were confused. They certainly didn’t appear to be Arab extremists bent on filling our airwaves with anti-American propaganda. These were American journalists from Washington, D.C. And they were no slouches; many, we learned, had decades of experience with news networks like CNN and NBC. But, Al-Jazeera English offers them more freedom to cover stories that are often ignored by the American mainstream media, they say. Plus, due to the global nature of the network, they reach a broader audience: the entire English-speaking world, some 100 million viewers, including Africa and Asia.
“We’ve had a lot of success in the U.S. market,” producer, Jeremy Young, says. “People are hungry for other sources of news. So it’s a very important market, but it’s far from the only focus of our network.”
Across the Atlantic, the network won a 2007 “Editor’s Award” at the Association of International Broadcasting Media Awards ceremony in London for their show, “Every Woman,” which covers women’s rights issues around the world.
Yet, despite their success and growing prestige, reporters are still fighting the stigma attached to the network in the United States. On Jan. 23, the crew here at Mac’s covered an Obama event alongside other major networks at J.V. Martin Junior High, a “corridor of shame” school in Dillon, S.C. When a school administrator learned they were from Al-Jazeera they were asked to leave the premises.One of the Al-Jazeera cameramen, a journalist with 30 years of experience at NBC News, couldn’t believe it.
“They’ve totally stereotyped us. They see Al-Jazeera and they think, ‘You’re the enemy.’
And this is an educator. That’s what ticked me off. She should have gone online, checked out this reporter’s specific work and then said ‘I don’t like you, personally.’ But she just looked at the name of the network.”
City Paper attempted to talk with the principle of the school by phone on Jan. 28 and 29 but she was out of her office and still unavailable for comment at press time.
Before Al-Jazeera Arabic broadcast videotaped statements from Osama Bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders in 2001, the West largely praised the network for bringing investigative journalism and a free press to the Middle East. A bloodless coup in Qatar in 1995 led to a broad liberalization of the country and the following year, the Qatari government issued a decree establishing Al-Jazeera as an independent television station. Bolstered by the growing availability of satellite TV in the Persian Gulf region, the network began to deliver unbiased news coverage and commentary to viewers that had previously only known heavily censored, state-run programming. Virtually every government in the Middle East has since lodged official complaints with Qatar over Al-Jazeera’s coverage of human rights violations and political dissent in their countries.
The fledgling network ran news talk shows that regularly pitted supporters of the peace process in Israel against pro-Palestinian radicals or secular liberals against Islamic militants. In 2000, Libya went so far as to withdraw their ambassador to Qatar after the network ran an interview with an opposition figure to the regime and the Algerian government once cut the electricity to large swaths of the country when the station broadcast an expose on the Algerian civil war.
The network ran afoul of the U.S. after Sept. 11 when Al-Qaida began to leak videotaped threats to the United States and Europe through Al-Jazeera. Many in the West began to view the network as a mouthpiece for terror groups and resented that the network aired graphic images from the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. government was quick to retaliate.
In 2001, Sudanese Al-Jazeera cameraman, Sami Al Hajj, was detained at the Pakistan border while on assignment to cover the U.S. war in Afghanistan and is being held indefinitely and without trial at Guantanamo as an enemy combatant of the United States. According to a 2004 BBC News report, Hajj claims to have been beaten and repeatedly interrogated. In other reports, he claims to have been sexually assaulted by U.S. military personnel. In 2005, his attorney claimed that U.S. officials have repeatedly asked Hajj if Al-Jazeera is linked to Al-Qaida. Despite earlier letters expressing a determination to return to his wife and son, Al Hajj has lately been refusing to eat. In October 2007, his attorney reported to the Committee to Protect Journalists that the U.S. military is now force-feeding him intravenously and stated that his health and mental state have drastically deteriorated.
Later, U.S. tactics against the news organization became more extreme as the war in Iraq dragged on. Rolling Stone reported in 2005 that early in the war, the Pentagon charged public relations firm, the Rendon Group, to police Al-Jazeera’s Iraq War coverage and to, according to the report, “punish” those journalists who conveyed the “wrong message.”
In April, 2003 reporter Tareq Ayoub was killed when a U.S. missile hit the Al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad. Two months earlier, according to documents obtained by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the network had sent a letter to Victoria Clarke, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs in Washington, to alert the U.S. military of the office’s address and map coordinates and to inform them that citizen journalists would be working there. On April 8, according to the report, a single U.S. missile was fired on those exact coordinates, killing Ayoub. That missile strike occurred mere hours before an American tank shell penetrated the Reuters office in the Palestine Hotel, another site designated for journalists, killing a Ukranian cameraman and severely injuring another reporter. Al-Jazeera offices were also bombed in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2001.
Here at home, Al-Jazeera reporters were banned from covering the New York Stock Exchange in 2003. That same year, John Racine, an American computer hacker, crashed the Al-Jazeera English Web site and redirected visitors to a site he created featuring an American flag and, ironically, the slogan, “Let Freedom Ring.” Racine was later found guilty of wire fraud and other charges and was sentenced to community service and a $1,500 fine. Another group of hackers, still at large, regularly disrupted Internet service to the site and a number of stateside Web hosts backed out of hosting the site once it launched.
While the physical attacks on Al-Jazeera reporters and property have declined, the network is still virtually shut out from the American public sphere and the bulk of their human rights and human interest stories go largely unseen. Their station ID usually only pops up on American TV when CNN attributes graphic war zone footage to the network.
Killing the Stigma with Kindness
Back at Mac’s, word comes in that John Edwards and Hillary Clinton have delivered their concession speeches. Al-Jazeera completes their final transmission of the night and well after 10 p.m. the crew grabs a table for a late dinner and to catch the last blues set. Jeremy Young eases down into a chair, orders a Glenlivet on the rocks and asks for a dinner menu.
“I get to go home and see my wife for a couple of days and then we’re off to Alabama to cover Super Tuesday,” he says.
Though the network will have live feeds from all over the country for Super Tuesday, they particularly want a sense of what’s going on in the South. “We’ll get together with local residents, average Joes, teachers, factory workers, just regular people to get a sense about how they feel about the election. At this point it’s so interesting because everything is up in the air, both for Democrats and Republicans. That intrigue carries overseas, as well.”
“We look at the U.S. election very much as the world’s election,” he says, stirring his drink.
“It’s not only going to effect Americans, but will also have an effect on the global community.”
Sure, he admits, there are always challenges they face being Al-Jazeera. But for every person who is negative about the network, there are many more who are positive. And, at the end of the day, the stigma attached to the name hasn’t hindered their ability to get the story.
“Part of the mantra at Al-Jazeera is to tell the stories that aren’t being told,” he says. “So, while American networks spend their time covering Britney Spears’ sister having a baby or other stories that aren’t really important in the context of peoples’ lives in the world, we’re more than happy to focus on stories about education and the economy.”
Young thinks one of the bigger stories out of South Carolina that will affect the global economy is the closing of the textile plants and factories throughout the state. “We were in Kingstree and we went to the unemployment center and we met some guys who had spent 30 years working at textile plants that were closed down and moved overseas. So it was interesting to talk to them to see how they were adapting their lives in the context of globalization. And that’s interesting to our audience, as well.”
