[R-G] Avi Lewis: Canada needs Al Jazeera

[Anthony Fenton]

Avi Lewis: Canada needs Al Jazeera
By Jenn Watt
| March 3, 2009
http://rabble.ca/news/avi-lewis-canada-needs-al-jazeera

Al Jazeera English is in the process of getting Canadian Radio- 
television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approval to be  
carried on Canadian cable TV. It may be a difficult process for the  
broadcaster that was protested -- and eventually strongly restricted  
-- when it applied to the regulator in 2004 to broadcast its Arabic  
channel. Avi Lewis, a former CBC broadcaster who has been working for  
Al Jazeera English for the past year, describes his experiences with  
the network and tells rabble.ca's Jenn Watt why it is crucial that  
North America let Al Jazeera in.

Jenn Watt: If you could give me some background on what you're doing  
with Al Jazeera English.

Avi Lewis: It was just by total coincidence, it was just a few weeks  
after my last CBC show was abruptly cancelled, or strangled in the  
crib would be more appropriate. We had done a pilot in May of 2007 for  
a daily half-hour international news analysis show called On the Map  
and it got the green light and everything was set to go and we were  
going to launch it as a ... season of daily programming in the fall ...

A couple weeks before we were supposed to get serious about  
relaunching the show in the fall they cancelled it. I actually found  
out on a brief phone call that I got while I was on tour with Naomi  
[Klein] for the Shock Doctrine launch. Just a few weeks later I got  
approached by Al Jazeera to come in and do an audition for a new  
election year show that they were doing - a show that was ultimately  
called Inside USA, which was a half-hour weekly show, which I hosted  
all of last year that looked at issues in the United States that were  
off the radar of the official election talk. In other words, our  
mandate on Inside USA was to tell the stories in the United States  
that ought to be on the front burner in an election year, but were  
left outside the very narrow box of traditional election coverage.

So when they said that was the show's concept, I mean, I thought I was  
dreaming because my initial response was that that's what I live to  
do. That's the kind of journalism I've always tried to do.

JW: Are you still working for them now that the election's over?

AL: Yes. The show was never conceived of as an ongoing show, it was a  
special election year look at the United States to give the  
international audience a glimpse at issues Americans face because  
there was so much global attention on the United States in an election  
year and now with the financial crisis.
Advertising

Al Jazeera felt there was a strong need to give people more than just  
the horse race and the typical campaign coverage, and try to give  
longer format pieces and more substantive kind of TV journalism, which  
is quite out of fashion on most networks these days, but for Al  
Jazeera that's the whole point of doing television. When the election  
came, that was all that was planned for the show. From about halfway  
through that first year, they liked what we were doing and committed  
to relaunching it. [The program will be launched in the spring, though  
the title hasn't been released yet.]

JW: In your broadcast experience are there any journalistic  
differences at Al Jazeera, like are they more or less open to story  
ideas, or are there differences in staffing levels and resources?

AL: The first thing that must be said about Al Jazeera is - I've been  
working in private and public broadcasting for almost 20 years - and  
I've never even heard of a broadcaster that has anything approaching  
the philosophy of Al Jazeera. It's very straightforward philosophy and  
Tony Burman [managing director] has been articulating it very clearly  
in his case to the Canadian people for why we need Al Jazeera here.  
It's a place I've always wanted to work.

Very simply, it is an unabashedly ambitious project to reverse the  
information flows on the planet and let people of the Global South  
give their version of events to people in the richest countries; to  
give a voice to the voiceless, and to tell truth to power.

Those corporate concepts speak to the original and critical role of  
journalism in functioning democracies, especially as we can see so  
starkly these days, the political classes of most of the countries on  
earth were kind of all singing from the same song book when it came to  
the uniform policies and ideologies that have been locked-in in the  
last decades and it's led us to a staggering global collapse.

Someone has to actually provide a check and balance on power and  
multinational media corporations with their huge resources and power  
should be that countervailing force to the way power operates in the  
world and the orthodoxies that it embraces. In many countries they  
haven't been.

The notion that you work for a company where the corporate mission  
statement is to try to represent the views of the Global South and try  
to give those people in those parts of the world their own megaphone  
and to challenge power in a principled and rigorous, factual way I  
think is tremendously important right now. ...

I think there is a huge scope in North America to play a similar role  
to be a voice for people who don't have one under the current  
system. ... Something's a little iffy in claiming to be a voice for  
anyone, but certainly in television it's easy to hand people a  
microphone and just allow a huge range of humans who never been on TV  
to tell their own stories.

JW: Do you think that if Al Jazeera is allowed to come into Canada and  
get some footing in North America, do you think that would affect the  
other Western news broadcasts?

AL: I really do. I think Al Jazeera being on cable in Canada would be  
very helpful to other broadcasters, simply because when you talk to  
people who really care about the news and consume a lot of news, there  
has been growing frustration for years now in the extremely myopic  
character of Canadian TV news.

Bureaus have been closing and commitments to international  
newsgathering, from newspapers and TV stations alike, the commitment  
has been dwindling. I think that the Canadian audience is extremely  
globally minded. It's one of the aspects of our national culture and  
character that we are internationalists by default - many of us, if  
not all of us. People are craving news from all corners of the globe.

As the crisis we're in is utterly global and the period that we're in  
is one of tremendous interconnectedness of policies and their impacts,  
people are desperate to get a clear sense from the ground in other  
parts of the world of what's going on and how events are affecting  
people's lives.

And they're not getting it in the way they want it from the private  
broadcaster or the public broadcaster and for Al Jazeera with its 69  
bureaus and truly global newsgathering machine to set up shop in this  
country, it will really raise the bar on international coverage. And I  
think that the other networks will be forced to respond by upping the  
ante in their international coverage and I think that would be  
tremendously healthy for Canadian journalism and Canadian democracy.

JW: Within the journalism community, other reporters that you know of,  
what's the feeling about Al Jazeera? Is there any hesitation from  
other journalists to join in or accept it as a legitimate broadcaster?

AL: No. Here's the weird thing about Al Jazeera. You have the  
propaganda about Al Jazeera, which really came from the Bush  
administration in the early days after the initial invasion of  
Afghanistan and really grew during the invasion of Iraq. And it was  
taken up by various right-wing interest groups with their own axes to  
grind in a period that we're finally coming out of globally that was  
defined by this deeply Islamophobic so-called war on terror. And so  
that propaganda coming from the Bush administration was amplified by  
various groups in society who have big microphones, from Fox News  
spreading outward. There is a consciousness of the Al Jazeera brand,  
which is utterly false and doesn't correspond to reality, yet it is  
what most people know of Al Jazeera because they haven't been able to  
watch it on TV in North America.

So when people actually watch Al Jazeera English for the first time, a  
lot of people are bemused. They're wondering why it's not beheadings  
all the time because the stereotypes of Al Jazeera are so intense and  
have been so well disseminated. In fact, it's a very serious, grown- 
up, truly global, high-quality global news network. For people looking  
for this controversial, scandalous and edgy thing, people are  
sometimes disappointed because they think there is something elicit  
about Al Jazeera because of what they've heard.

Whenever people actually get a chance to watch the channel - and  
happily now there's an extremely good streaming service, which we can  
talk about later, that allows people to watch it if they have a high- 
speed Internet connection - you watch Al Jazeera for one hourly  
newscast and you say, "OK, this is a serious, truly global news  
network." And that's all it is. It's very hard for people to maintain  
those stereotypes about Al Jazeera if they actually watch the channel.  
So this is the challenge.

Journalists as a class tend to be fairly lazy - I don't think that's a  
secret, I've worked in media long enough to know that - but we also  
tend to be news junkies. So the journalist class in Canada, most of  
it, has checked in on Al Jazeera and ... you find that most  
journalists are up to speed on what Al Jazeera is doing and a huge  
number of them therefore are huge fans. ...

The actual quality of the journalism - the double sourcing of all  
facts, the careful use of language, the commitment to showing all  
sides and all perspectives on stories - it's all there and you see  
that as soon as you watch it for five minutes, it's as clear as day.

I think most journalists in Canada, who have taken the time to watch  
Al Jazeera probably want to work there too. Because for people who  
really want to do news about the rest of the world, there is nowhere  
like Al Jazeera.

JW: Do you think that the stigma that Al Jazeera carries in English  
and the English world is playing into why we don't have it already in  
Canada?

AL: Oh, there's no question. When Al Jazeera Arabic applied for  
carriage here a few years ago, the members of the CRTC were subjected  
to a kind of fear campaign in the climate of global terrorism anxiety.  
Al Jazeera was painted as something that it's not. And in the  
compromise position, the CRTC did authorize Al Jazeera for carriage in  
Canada, but they placed conditions on it that are so ridiculous that  
no cable operator could make it financially feasible to do it.

JW: You said you wanted to come back to Livestation?

AL: Livestation's been a real turning point in the ability of people  
to watch Al Jazeera in those few places in the world - let's remember  
we're talking about it's available in over 100 countries and in the  
minority number of countries in the world where Al Jazeera is not  
available on cable or satellite, we happen to be in one of the two  
main counties that can't get Al Jazeera.

JW: What's the other one?

AL: The United States. I think we're two of the most important media  
markets in the world and we have been deprived.

JW: Is there anything that you wanted to add?

AL: I think it's worth saying that this an extremely important moment  
in Canadian media where we have the potential arrival of a new player  
that will really, I think, open the floodgates for international news,  
which is incredibly important right now more so than at any other  
point in history. I do expect that there will be a public debate  
because of a lot of the, in my view, entirely illegitimate bad press  
that Al Jazeera has received from folks with a very clear political  
and ideological reason for tarnishing Al Jazeera's image.

We need to speak up. People need to go to IWantAJE.ca and figure out  
how to watch the channel. All you need to do is challenge your  
assumptions for a couple of newscasts and you'll have a very clear  
sense. And if we can get people doing that I think Canadians will be  
extraordinarily well-served and I do think that they will be a ripple  
effect in other media.

The same people who spoke out against Al Jazeera Arabic have already  
made it clear that they're going to be campaigning against Al Jazeera  
English. I think rabble readers and others who are interested in  
getting this important source of global news on television sets for  
our fellow Canadians really need to engage with this because I think  
there are a few Canadian journalists who have moved to Al Jazeera and  
we're doing it because we think that this network has an intense  
public service value to people all over the world.

Canadians need to be part of it and we need to approach this as a  
campaign. I think once Canada can watch Al Jazeera, there will be a  
tremendous opportunity for Al Jazeera to air in the States and that  
will broaden the horizons of people in a very important country with  
one of the most claustrophobic media cultures on earth and I think  
that will be an even bigger public service ultimately.


Jenn is editor of rabble.ca's In Cahoots section and is also a  
reporter for a community newspaper in rural Ontario. She can often be  
found at home with her cats, wobbling about a lake in her kayak or  
reading a subversive magazine in the downtown laundromat.