English-language Al Jazeera would change perception of channel: TV producer

A senior program producer with Arabic news channel Al Jazeera thinks that the launch of an English-language version of the service next year will aid its entry into Canada. Establishing the international English-language version of the channel that has caused controversy for airing tapes of Osama Bin Laden will also allow people to see that it is not anti-Semitic, Hassan Ibrahim told Canadian Communications Reports during an interview at the World Congress of History Producers in Toronto last week. "I think after the launch of our English channel, people will see the real Al Jazeera, because it is getting lost in translation now," says Ibrahim, a Sudanese-British journalist who worked for BBC Arabic News before moving to Al Jazeera in 1996. He adds, "We need our message heard without distortion from other people…There are so many assumptions about our broadcast." Ibrahim – who was raised in several countries, including Saudi Arabia where he was briefly a classmate of Bin Laden – finds unfair the current CRTC policy that granted the Arabic-language channel entry into Canada, but then required cable TV and satellite TV distributors to censor it. "I think that the Canadian laws are very tricky. They are shooting themselves in the foot because what they are trying to say is that you can air it provided you censor yourself. That’s not free press," he says. "You allow free speech, but then because you assume that Al Jazeera is anti-Semitic, or Al Jazeera is anti-Israeli, you muzzle it. Put it on the screen, because people are going to watch it anyway," he says. "People are watching it as we speak in Canada through illegal satellite and on the Internet." (CCR Update, May 12/03). Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA) president Michael Hennessy says that the cable industry could be interested in sponsoring the English-language version of Al Jazeera to get on the list of services eligible for carriage in Canada. "That’s (an English-language Al Jazeera) certainly an interesting proposition," he says. "We could quite possibly (sponsor it), but we don’t have any information at this point." The cable industry has always been against the CRTC’s decision to make them content gatekeepers, and there have been whisperings that it might possibly launch a legal challenge. While Hennessy says he is unaware of any cablecos who are moving in that direction, he adds that the challenge probably wouldn’t come before the courts but in the CRTC process itself. "The commission’s decision said that if you want to carry Al Jazeera, you should apply for a condition of licence and set out how you are going to monitor the programming. So if someone was to appeal, it would be during that process that would be the likely place to do it," he tells CCR. Ibrahim says the international Al Jazeera channel, the launch of which was announced last week, would not mirror the Arabic service. "It will be independent. It will have the same principles but the target audience is different, the language is different. It will be more international than (the current) Al Jazeera," he said.

English-language Al Jazeera would change perception of channel: TV producer

Broadcast | November 8, 2004

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