In the halls of American power, the Arab Spring has brought Al-Jazeera in from the cold.
Seven years after then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the broadcaster’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” and President George W. Bush joked about bombing it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised it as “real news” in her recent Senate testimony.
Not only that, her staffers, as well as those of the CIA and the Obama White House, were attending the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner as Al-Jazeera’s guests.
“They are a really important media entity, and we have a really great relationship with them,” said Dana Shell Smith, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international media engagement, who speaks Arabic and has frequently appeared on the channel. “This administration has empowered those of us who actually do the communicating to be in a close relationship with Al-Jazeera. They understand that the relationship can’t consist of complaining to each other about the differences we have.”
The differences also have shrunk as the big story in the Middle East has shifted from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the democratic movements sweeping the region. In the recent uprisings, U.S. interests tended to line up with Al-Jazeera’s, and President Barack Obama alluded to both the network’s influence and its pro-democracy bent in remarks caught on an open mic during a closed-door fundraiser last week.
“The emir of Qatar come by the Oval Office today, and he owns Al-Jazeera basically,” Obama said in remarks recorded by CBS News’s Mark Knoller. “Pretty influential guy. He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle East. Reform, reform, reform. You’re seeing it on Al-Jazeera.”
But even an in an Al-Jazeera-friendly Obama administration there are tensions. The president continued, delivering some harsh criticism that conflicted directly with his diplomatic comments earlier in the day, when he had praised the emir for his leadership “when it comes to democracy in the Middle East.”
“He himself is not reforming significantly,” the president told the donors. “There is no big move towards democracy in Qatar.”
But even if the president thinks Al-Jazeera’s Qatari owners might have a blind spot, his remarks before an audience of the rich and powerful reflected how recent events in the Middle East and North Africa have accelerated the shift of Al-Jazeera’s brand from “anti-American” to “pro-democracy” in the American consciousness.
“It’s like Rip Van Winkle — you wake up and, my God, it’s a different world,” said Tony Burman, Al Jazeera English’s chief strategic adviser for the Americas. “Hosni Mubarak did in 18 days what I thought it would take two years to do.”
Burman, a former editor in chief of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News, served as managing director of AJE in Doha before coming to Washington last fall to take on his new strategic role that includes helping get AJE the national cable and satellite distribution it still lacks in the U.S.
When he arrived, he could never have guessed that within a few months, protests would erupt across Al-Jazeera’s backyard and that its reporters would be there on the ground to cover them, often before anyone else, making his case for him.
“In the autumn, I met many people in the political and media realm here in Washington, and in New York City as well, and it was still, at that point, a lot of curiosity of Al-Jazeera, but not much understanding of it,” he said. “Now, almost overnight, the situation has changed. The impact and importance of Al-Jazeera seems to be visible to all, particularly people in Washington.”
Today, when he visits the White House, officials tell him they watch AJE to monitor the protests, and at the State Department, “when you go down the hallway, you see it on virtually every TV and computer.”
The channel’s coverage of Tunisia and Egypt, in particular, and the 2,500 percent surge in traffic to the broadcaster’s website that they caused at their peak — 60 percent of it from within the U.S. — has prompted scores of glowing newspaper profiles, with The New York Times going so far as to press 10 cable providers for comment about whether they would consider carrying it. (Right now, the channel is only available in a handful of American cities, including Washington, D.C., via the nonprofit broadcaster MHz Networks.)
Recognizing an opportunity, AJE began running full-page newspaper ads touting testimonials from its fans, in hopes of inspiring cable and satellite customers to nag their providers about adding the channel. To date, more than 50,000 of them have obliged, Burman said.
Students and activists unaffiliated with the channel took up AJE’s campaign for cable and satellite carriage as a kind of political cause, organizing a national call-in day and setting up a Demand Al Jazeera Facebook page.
All of this scares the living daylights out of Cliff Kincaid, director of the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Reporting and president of America’s Survival, who organized a “Stop Al Jazeera"conference at the National Press Club in Washington earlier this month.
Kincaid said he organized the event — headlined by Pamela Geller, the blogger best known for breathing life into the so-called ground zero mosque story — in part, to counter the campaign to get AJE wider distribution throughout the U.S. and in part, to put pressure on Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) to include an investigation into Al-Jazeera as part of his House Homeland Security Committee hearings on homegrown Muslim radicalization.
“To Comcast, and other cable and satellite providers, we say, do not expand Al-Jazeera throughout the U.S. Otherwise you will increase the chances of Americans being killed by those manipulated by ‘Jihad TV,’ the terrorist network, and you, Comcast, will have blood on your hands,” Kincaid told an audience of about 30 at the press club.
Kincaid pointed to a statement by Judea Pearl, father of the slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who called Al-Jazeera “the most powerful voice of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Kincaid has been one of the most consistent voices raising concerns about AJE’s spread into the U.S. since the channel’s inception in 2006. Both organizations that he is associated with, AIM and America’s Survival, have received some of their biggest grants from foundations controlled by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, an investor in the conservative Newsmax magazine and the owner of the right-leaning Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Scaife’s foundations have also funded David Horowitz’s nonprofit, which has sponsored aggressive scrutiny of American Islam.
So far, neither Comcast nor King’s office has gotten back to Kincaid on his requests. A Comcast spokeswoman told POLITICO only, “We do not have a carriage agreement with Al Jazeera English,” though AJE programming does air on Comcast in the Washington market through MHz Networks.
Kincaid said he met with King and Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) seeking an investigation into, among other things, “the activities of foreign propaganda channels Al-Jazeera, Russia Today television and Iranian Press TV on American soil.”
King’s chief of staff Kevin Fogarty said that “no hearing is planned” and declined to comment further. Gingrey’s office confirmed that the meeting took place, but declined to comment about Al-Jazeera.
In fact, few Republicans seem to have an appetite for criticizing Al-Jazeera at the moment.
Even Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), the one Republican who was willing to speak to his concerns about AJE’s possible expansion in the U.S., framed his fears in the conditional.
“Dr. Broun has misgivings about an increased presence of Al Jazeera English in the United States,” his spokeswoman, Meredith Griffanti, told POLITICO. “If Al Jazeera English hopes to establish itself more so on American soil, it must prove to the United States that their intentions are primarily improving our relations with the Middle East — rather than promoting anti-American rhetoric.”
Al-Jazeera’s brand problems in the U.S. were set in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the Arabic channel owned by the Qatari government ran video tapes of Osama bin Laden before anyone else got them, and its critical coverage of the Iraq War made it deeply unpopular with the Pentagon.
By 2005, the Bush administration’s displeasure with Al-Jazeera was so intense that it was straining the U.S.'s relationship with Qatar, an important ally in the region, and Qatari officials were considering selling off the station, The New York Times reported.
That same year, Qatar hired Barbour Griffith & Rogers, the lobbying and public relations firm founded by Haley Barbour, on a $300,000 contract to improve relations with the Bush administration, according to O’Dwyer’s PR Daily.
A person familiar with the Qatar contact confirmed to POLITICO that BGR and Al-Jazeera have a long-standing relationship, and that the network embarked on a PR push during the latter half of the Bush administration.
“The PR campaign, to a certain degree, was successful,” said Suhail Khan, who served in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Bush administration. “They just began booking Republican guests.”
AJE’s leadership had high hopes that Obama’s inauguration would begin a new era of relations with the U.S., but his decision to give his first interview to Al Arabiya, its Saudi-owned rival, reflected ongoing uneasiness with the Al-Jazeera brand.
“When President Obama can out, the first network he spoke to was Al Arabiya because of a bit of an allergy that I think was wrong,” said Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, who recently participated in the Al-Jazeera Centre’s three-day forum in Doha.
The Arab Spring has done more to change that than anything else to date.
“There has been a switch on the perception of Al Jazeera Arabic, simply because right now, the U.S. and Al Jazeera Arabic are more aligned in backing the democracy movements,” said Marc Lynch, associate professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University and blogger at Foreign Policy, who was also at the forum. “It’s not like Al-Jazeera or the U.S. have changed that much. The issues have changed.”