Arab Media & Society

But it is the comprehensive nature of the coverage, the seamless integration of news and programming, which has resulted in a body of work that not only brings viewers into the heart of the conflict, but sets the war in its political, geographic and historical context.

Standouts include Sami Zeidan’s take-no-prisoners interviews with IDF spokespeople, Kamal Santa Maria’s touching conversation with the secretary general of the Swedish Red Cross on the human toll, and “Gaza: The Road to War,” a special that took viewers back sixty years.

Whether in the field or in the studio, AJE’s coverage has been cool and collected, largely free of the emotion that is often in evidence on its sister Arabic-language network; and the word “martyr,” used by Al Jazeera Arabic and many other Arab news organizations to describe Palestinian dead, has not crossed the lips of AJE’s staffers.

The overarching title of AJE’s coverage, “War On Gaza,” telegraphed the channel’s perspective – “on” not “in” was a conscious choice.  The reporting reflected a distinct attitude; an implicit sense of identification with the Palestinian victims – the civilians, not the Hamas fighters – evident, for example, in a crawl at the bottom of the screen listing the names and ages of some of the more than 300 Palestinian children killed.

But it is an engaged journalism borne of empathy that, to this viewer’s mind, stopped short of betraying an overt bias against Israel – much to the disappointment of some Arabs, such as a guest columnist in Qatar’s Ash Sharq newspaper, who charged that “the English-language channel either consciously or unconsciously is moving within the orbit of the Israeli approach.”

AJE’s correspondents inside Israel – veterans of the BBC, ITN and CNN – have been aggressive in their approach, as in reporter James Bays’ questioning of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, but they have also not shied away from reporting on the impact of Hamas missiles on Israeli citizens.

The American networks, by contrast, have largely abandoned the Middle East.  A few weeks before the Gaza crisis broke CBS News fired most of the staff of its Israel bureau.  ABC recently cut a deal to use the BBC’s reporting from Baghdad so it can strip down its own operation.  The evening newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC together gave just 434 minutes of airtime to Iraq in 2008, according to the Tyndall Report, and there were days in the first two weeks of the Gaza war when the networks did not bother to air a piece on the conflict.

They are, essentially, ceding reporting of the region (and much of the world) to others.  Ironically, in the long run, given the U.S. networks’ track record in recent years, that may be a good thing – if these alternatives become more available to the average American.  For the moment, BBC America is seen on some cable systems, CNN International cannot be viewed inside the U.S., and, with a few localized exceptions, Al Jazeera English is only available online via Livestation and YouTube.

The kind of borderless journalism these channels increasingly offer creates the potential to replace the myopic coverage that has fueled misunderstanding since 9/11, staking out space in the uncharted turf between the rival bloodshot lenses of the domestic U.S. and Arab networks.

It is a place where worldviews are not quite so fixed, where audiences are exposed to more than just their own preconceived notions, and where a new definition of balance just might be found.

Lawrence Pintak is publisher/co-editor of Arab Media & Society and director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at The American University in Cairo.  His most recent book is Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas.