The Philadelphia Inquirer Gail Shister Column: Maybe This Time: Al-Jazeera Says Spin-Off to Launch Soon
By Gail Shister, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Nov. 2–Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Al-Jazeera International says it will launch Nov. 15.
AJI, the English-language spin-off of controversial Arab-language Al-Jazeera Network, was expected to have launched early this year. Then late winter. Then early spring. Then late May.
Each time, AJI officials blamed the setbacks on technical problems. This time, they say everything’s a go for Nov. 15, which coincides with Al-Jazeera’s 10th anniversary.
Not everybody believes it will actually happen.
“It’s like the little boy crying wolf,” says mediaweek analyst Marc Berman. “If you’re going to launch, then launch. They have no credibility. They’ve been so vague, nobody’s taking them seriously.
“Where are they, already?”
Don’t look for them here. As of yesterday, no cable provider or satellite company in the United States had agreed to carry the worldwide news and current-events network.
U.S. cable giant Comcast, with more than 24 million subscribers, “has not moved beyond preliminary discussions,” says a rep.
Odds are equally slim at Time Warner (13.5 million subscribers), where a spokeswoman will say only that there’s no deal with AJI.
What about satellite services?
DirecTV, with 15.5 million customers, says no. Most likely carrier will be EchoStar Communications’ Dish network (12.5 million), the lone U.S. distributor of Arab-language Al-Jazeera.
“We have not made any announcements regarding AJI at this time,” a rep says. AJI officials have said they will announce carriage agreements closer to launch.
AJI reps did not return repeated phone calls and e-mails yesterday.
Ditto for AJI Washington anchor Dave Marash, a former Nightline correspondent. (Though he joined AJI in January, Marash still identifies himself with Nightline on his cell-phone voice-mail.)
According to mediaweek’s Berman, AJI will have a tough time here if it’s only on satellite. “In a very populated marketplace, it won’t attract enough interest” without a cable presence.
Cable operators will be reluctant to carry AJI because it’s related to Al-Jazeera, says Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
Many Americans see Al-Jazeera as a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Both networks are based in Qatar, bankrolled by the emir.
Given the political climate here, cable systems “will be wary of putting their hands on a third rail like AJI if they can avoid it,” Jones says.
“There would be significant backlash from customers, especially if the network broadcasts pictures of dismembered American soldiers. Imagine what the blogosphere would do with it.”
Jeff Jarvis, creator of buzzmachine.com and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, says AJI would do better as a broadband enterprise.
“If your goal is to get a new audience, why not launch on the Web? That’s the way to do it now. If there’s not a big audience there [to support a network] now, there will be damn soon.”
AJI has broadcast centers in Doha, Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington. The network expects to reach more than 30 million homes at launch.
Some media experts don’t believe AJI will launch anywhere on Nov. 15.
“That has about as much chance of happening as Rosie O’Donnell getting a show on Fox News,” says Matthew Felling of Washington’s Center for Media and Public Affairs.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” says Harvard’s Jones. “I don’t think anybody will take it seriously until it happens.”
Even if AJI manages to happen everywhere around the world except the States, it won’t make it, Felling predicts.
“America was going to be the crown jewel of their entire enterprise. You either raise all the sails on the mast or wait until the wind is right.”
Koppel in Iran. Ted Koppel’s second Discovery Channel special, Iran — The Most Dangerous Nation, debuts at 9 p.m. Nov. 19.
Koppel, whose groundbreaking coverage of the Iran hostage crisis morphed into ABC’s Nightline in 1980, traveled throughout Iran for three weeks for the two-hour special.
He and his team were the last group of journalists allowed into Iran before its government stopped granting journalist visas, Discovery says.
Contact TV columnist Gail Shister at 215-854-2224 or gshister@philly news.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/gailshister.
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