Ten-year taboo-breaker broadens net
Thursday, November 2, 2006
“Eid meelad sa'eed!” I’d like to say to Al Jazeera. The Arab 24-hour Arabic satellite TV news network reached its tenth birthday this week.
That’s despite the ill-wishes over the years of some powerful people and some who should know better.
George W Bush discussed bombing its studios, according to the five-page transcript of an unguarded April 2004 conversation with Tony Blair -- but maybe, it’s been said, he was only joking. A more professional jokester, Conan O’Brien, said Al Jazeera would be the natural venue for a talk-show hosted by Mel Gibson, when the actor/director was busted for driving drunk, with aggravated anti-Semitism.
And just to demonstrate the station’s equal-opportunity policy on causing offense – there’s scarcely an Arab country that hasn’t banned Al Jazeera at one time or other. It still can’t operate a bureau in, ironically enough, Mr Bush’s least favorite Arab country, Syria.
It’s hard to exaggerate what a transformative role Al Jazeera has played. “It changed all aspects of life in the Arab world, not just the Arab media,” says the UK-based Mid-East communications specialist Amani Soleman. “And what it brought to the Arab media was unheard-of before. It gave a voice to the underdog, it gave a voice to the other opinion”. I once heard one of the station’s own investigative reporters marveling, “we couldn’t believe what taboos we were breaking, talking about religion, freedom of expression, democracy. All this previously had to go through a censor”.
Al Jazeera is now attempting to ramp up its mold-breaking influence, directly into the English-speaking world. Its long-planned English-language service Al Jazeera International will finally launch in two week’s time. It has taken on hundreds of staff, drawing largely on the BBC and ITN in Britain, Canadian stations and even a few American sources. The new arrivals are not always broadcast-hardened. As I reported in print and online back in May 2005, the network’s New York correspondent (covering the UN as well as the city) will be Mark Seddon, previously Editor of the Labour Party-supporting Tribune magazine in London.
The well-established transatlantic broadcaster Sir David Frost was another early enlistee, but AJI is also making a point of elevating journalists who originate in the developing world. Rageh Omaar, who is Somali-born (and a Muslim) distinguished himself reporting from Baghdad for the BBC, and is now to anchor an Al Jazeera discussion-show.
Delays to the launch have been attributed, especially by TV trade publications, to the network’s poor prospects for advertising, and disappointing carriage agreements with cable-TV providers. But these are not critical difficulties – the operation will enjoy a hefty subsidy (already more than $1 billion), from the fabulously wealthy Emir of Qatar, as the parent channel always has. I hear that the main problem has been technical – teething troubles, often severe, in the high-definition systems that the network is helping to develop along with the supplying manufacturers.
IT’S ALWAYS FASCINATING to see a fresh iteration of a piece of work that’s enjoyed a multi-media life. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, having begun as a story in The New Yorker by Muriel Spark, has transmuted over time to a novel, a play, a movie, and even a (best-forgotten) TV series, and has now returned as a play. Not to Broadway, though, but to two blocks west at The Acorn, a comfortable space in New York’s newish Theatre Row complex.
Scott Elliott’s direction is economical and luminous, highlighting many interpersonal connections (both real and symbolic) that we might otherwise miss. And one scene in particular is electrifying – the pivotal exchange when Zoe Kazan, playing one of the maverick Miss Brodie’s prize students (the “crème de la crème” brood which the play reduces to just four, from the novel’s original six characters) is posing for her portrait by the Brodie-besotted art teacher, played by Ritchie Coster.
I can’t help as a Scot recording that the Edinburgh accents wander off-mark distractingly, even in the case of Cynthia Nixon as Brodie herself. But Nixon commands the stage, sometimes alarmingly – exhibiting much of the power that won her a Tony Award for last season’s Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsay-Abaire. It’s admirable to see the Sex and the City star parlay her recent television wattage in an onward direction that’s different from, say, Jennifer Aniston, and continue to tread New York’s boards in live drama, rather than run to Hollywood’s back-lots.
SOUTH AFRICA’S MEDIA HAD LITTLE GOOD to say on the death of former (white-minority) Prime Minister P W. Botha. But with characteristic magnanimity – and shrewdness – former (democratically-elected) President Nelson Mandela waited a full eight hours of the news cycle before paying a measured tribute to his old adversary. While acknowledging Botha’s abiding place in the nation’s life as a symbol of apartheid, Mandela praised him for “the steps he took to pave the way toward the eventual peacefully negotiated settlement in our country”. Mandela is sticking to his priority that national reconciliation trumps everything after what he called “our bitterly divided history”.
I’m prompted to recall how a bestiary convention common to much of Africa had Botha nicknamed by fellow-citizens as “The Crocodile”. But I filmed him once, in the face of international pressure to reform and release Mandela from jail, defiantly declaring: “We are not a nation of jelly-fish”. I’ve been intrigued by this particular animal reference ever since.
By the way, Archbishop Desmond Tutu once gave me a challenging explanation for Mandela’s almost superhuman (to me) capacity for forgiveness of his enemies. I am soon due to conduct a broadcast interview with Tutu. I shall report further on his analysis.