Page 77 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Transnational Trends in Political Communication

similarities have been attributed to Western practices coming to serve as
a professional model for the rest of the world (Nasser 1983; Straubhaar
et al. 1992). As a result, scholars have speculated about a “transnational
news-value culture” (Cohen et al. 1990, 44) in which, regardless of their
location, television journalists share a common professional culture, one
that reflects a Western view of what counts as news and how it should be
reported (Swanson and Smith 1993).
Recently, this settled view of the Western-oriented, transnational
news-value culture has been questioned by the success of the Al-Jazeera
Satellite Channel, a television news broadcaster based in Qatar. Al-
Jazeera received worldwide attention as a result of its extensive and
sometimes exclusive coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the
Afghan war, especially when it was the only broadcaster allowed to re-
main in Afghanistan during the early stages of the war and was also
the only broadcaster to receive and televise videotapes of Osama bin
Laden. Al-Jazeera was established in 1996 with a subsidy from the emir
of Qatar, who planned for it to be “an independent and nonpartisan
satellite TV network free from government scrutiny, control, and ma-
nipulation” (El-Nawawy and Iskandar 2002, 33). Al-Jazeera receives a
large annual subsidy from the emir (although it hopes to become self-
supporting soon through growing advertising revenue) and has a staff of
350 journalists and fifty foreign correspondents working in thirty-one
countries around the world. The core of this staff consists of journal-
ists who were hired when the BBC Arabic TV Service was closed in
1996, so that Al-Jazeera began with an editorial staff that was thoroughly
trained in the Western news tradition but also, unlike Western media,
was deeply knowledgeable about Arab politics (El-Nawawy and Iskandar
2002).
Al-Jazeera broadcasts in Arabic twenty-four hours a day with a mix
of Western-style news programs, political talk, and call-in shows. Its ed-
itorial independence sets it apart sharply from other Arab broadcasters,
who work mostly in government-controlled media and are constrained
to support the views of their national governments and not to give voice
to opposition spokespersons. In contrast, the journalistic models em-
ployed on Al-Jazeera are distinctly Western. Hosts of Al-Jazeera’s talk
shows invite guests of opposing views to challenge each other and re-
spond totelephonecallers,adistinctrarityinArabbroadcasting. Its pop-
ular program, “The Opposite Direction,” is modeled directly on CNN’s
Crossfire. “Secularists debate fundamentalists, Israelis debate Palestini-
ans, Iraqis debate Kuwaitis” (El-Nawawy and Iskander 2002, 51). Guests

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