"How you see something," said Nigel Parsons, the managing director of al-Jazeera International, "depends very much on where you're sitting."
Those words could well serve as the manifesto for the channel, the English-language offspring of the polarizing pan-Arab network, which will make its debut in more than 40 million households in late May.
Addressing hundreds of journalists and academics who had come to Doha, Qatar, for the second al-Jazeera Forum, Parsons promised that the new channel -- with its headquarters there and broadcast centers in Washington, London and Kuala Lumpur -- will cover the stories and people that the Western-owned news media overlook. "We're not going to be another CNN, BBC or Sky," he told the attendees on the last day of January. "If we were, there'd be no point." But, he added, "It's not our position to tell viewers what to think."
During a freewheeling question-and-answer session, the audience pressed him for details. With costs already surpassing a billion dollars, al-Jazeera is the most ambitious television network startup in recent years. Will it be the first network to crack the Western monopoly on delivering news and opinion to a global audience? Will it provide an Arab and Muslim point of view to the rest of the world?
Many at the forum hoped it would. But its top management is British, and its high-profile hires -- like the smooth interviewer David Frost and the former Nightline correspondent Dave Marash -- are hardly representative of the developing world. Will it then, the journalists wanted to know, just be colonialism in more modern garb?
Outside of that crowded conference room, the pressure is just as great. In the Arab world, al-Jazeera has a reputation for tackling thorny issues. But in the US, where it is best known for showing tapes of Osama bin Laden's tirades, one person's fearless reporting can quickly become another's dangerous propaganda. And the more widely it is viewed as a terrorist mouthpiece, the harder a time the channel will have getting a spot on the already-crowded US cable line-ups.
An oasis of modernization
Parsons understands the need to reassure new viewers in the West without disappointing old ones in the Arab world. "Essentially, it's about getting the balance right," he said.
A little more than five minutes from the 1980s-era opulence of the vast Sheraton on the Doha's corniche -- if the traffic-clogged roundabouts thoughtfully bequeathed by the British do not double the commute time -- lies the head-quarters of the Al-Jazeera networks. To describe the exterior as nondescript would be giving the dusty compound of squat buildings and satellite transponders too much credit. But inside, another story unfolds.
The Arabic-channel's new newsroom, which opened last year, is an airy space filled with Aeron chairs, slick flat-screen monitors and on-air sets whose color scheme (orangey green) morphs through the day.
Employees at al-Jazeera International boast of having one of the largest plasma screens of any newsroom in the world. From the newsroom on the first floor, a glass spiral staircase will lead to a mezzanine of open-plan news desks for the Web site and glass-walled offices, a rarity in the Arab world, where executive suites are more often clubby, private affairs. A fiber-optic network will connect Doha to its broadcast centers and other bureaus. There will also be a prayer room, as is customary in Qatari workplaces. Overall, it's a far cry from the tiny newsroom of the channel's early years, the one that prompted the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak to marvel during a 2000 visit, "All this trouble from a matchbox like this."
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