"We are a new trend in the Arab world," Ibrahim M. Helal was saying Thursday night in a corner of the busy newsroom of Al Jazeera, the satellite television channel now known all over the world for broadcasting Osama bin Laden's defiant speech on Sunday.
"Using the Western style, we have broken many taboos.
"Of course," added Helal, 32, the network's chief editor, "we upset most of the other Arab states."
On the back wall of the compact newsroom, a bank of 16 monitors displayed potential feeds -- a Marine general giving a briefing at the Pentagon, a Muslim cleric, an Afghan refugee on a horse riding past a ruined building with a child behind him, President Bush. The journalists at a dozen workstations, equipped with computers that display technical information and story lists in English and scripts in Arabic, included Gulf Arabs in spotless white dishdashas, a Sudanese with a distinctive loose turban, men in casual Western dress and women in pantsuits, their hair uncovered.
``Make sure you courtesy Jaz-eera,'' one of the women barked into a cell phone to a Western television network picking up footage from Jalalabad, inside Afghanistan.
Thursday's major exclusive was from Tayseer Allouni, the station's correspondent in Kandahar, the Taliban headquarters -- the only reporter there -- with videotape of two US warplanes in a clear blue sky bombing the center of the Taliban's operations. The videotape was later shown on CNN.
In a part of the world where news has always been the news the government wants, true or not, Al Jazeera is truly a phenomenon.
Throughout the Arab world, state television typically leads its newscast each night with the doings of the local potentate, frequently stepping off an airplane or waiting on the tarmac, embracing a fellow potentate. This is interspersed with clips of soldiers and tanks charging into mock battle as martial music plays in the background.
But Al Jazeera, whose slogan is ``The opinion -- the other opinion,'' is something different. The station's guest interviewees have ranged from the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and the longtime Israeli peace advocate Shimon Peres, to the uncompromising militants Sheik Hassan Nasrullah of Hezbollah and Sheik Ahmed Yaseen of Hamas, and even Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Like the shortwave radio broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that helped chip away at the Soviet empire, it is difficult to black out. Satellite dishes jump off the shelves, and even in countries like Iran that forbid them, there is a brisk business in disguising the discs as part of a garden.
The Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif described the importance of Al Jazeera to the Arab world, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, that "it is the one window through which we can breathe."
He recalled flipping through the channels in a Cairo hotel room and coming upon a station in Arabic with people speaking ``in a way I had only ever heard people speak in private -- away from the censorship and the various state security services that dominate our public discourse.
"Within the Arab world, this channel has made censorship of news and opinion pointless," Soueif wrote.
Al Jazeera was founded in 1996 as the showpiece of the new emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, as a symbol of his plans to modernize. It leaped to prominence in the last year covering the Palestinian intifada, with viewers throughout the Arab world glued to its broadcasts.
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