Al Jazeera Rising

Like CNN before it, the Qatari network is springboarding to prominence on the back of an international crisis.

Writing in the Toronto Star, Tony Burman argues that just as CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War propelled that channel into North Americans’ collective consciousness, the drama in Egypt may herald the dawn of Al Jazeera English as a universally respected mainstream news network. Burman is head of Al Jazeera’s strategy for the Americas so his article is obviously self-serving, but it’s hard to argue with his assessment that over the past eleven days the network has been “telling a larger, more nuanced story of [the Middle East] than is currently available to most North Americans.” According to Burman traffic to Al Jazeera’s live streaming site has increased a whopping 2,500 per cent since the Egypt crisis began, and 60 per cent of that viewership is coming from the U.S. “In that same period, an estimated 7 million Americans have watched 50 million minutes of AJE coverage,” he writes. And yet, Al Jazeera is not available throughout most of the States, and many commentators there as well as in Canada continue to claim that the network is sympathetic to terrorism. If there’s any evidence of this, we in The Mark Newsroom haven’t seen it.

Burman doesn’t go into it, but 20 years after it burst on the scene CNN's journalistic credentials aren’t looking so good. Thursday night, while Al Jazeera’s cast of unremarkable but professional newscasters continued its comprehensive, coverage of events in Cairo, viewers tuning into CNN were treated to the sight of celebrity reporter Anderson Cooper, squatting in “an undisclosed location” (as he apparently relished reminding viewers), doing his theatrical best to appear every bit the embattled newsman-in-the-field. Yes he was roughed up by demonstrators, but the network clearly has no shame in exploiting the incident. Cooper’s segments were intercut with expensive but uninformative graphics about the protests (this is the network that thought holograms would enhance its 2008 election coverage, after all). One can only imagine that CNN execs were more than a little miffed when Christiane Amanpour, who defected from the network to ABC last year, managed to score an interview with Hosni Mubarak this week.