Is the anti-American pie big enough to sustain MSNBC and al-Jazeera?

MSNBC now has some competition for the virulently anti-American American TV viewer.

Al Jazeera English language service began 24-hour a day broadcasts in Washington, D.C. on July 1.

But as Forbes points out, Al Jazeera has a bit of a marketing problem:

Though well respected among Muslims worldwide, in the U.S. Al Jazeera is presumed to be biased against the U.S. and western Europe. It has, at any rate, some controversial connections–or, depending on your point of view, courageous reporters. Correspondent Taysir Alouni interviewed Osama bin Laden just after the Sept. 11 attacks and is now under house arrest in Madrid after a Spanish court convicted him in 2005 of transporting cash for al Qaeda. Correspondent Tarek Ayoub was killed in a U.S. missile strike on Al Jazeera’s Baghdad headquarters in 2003; Alouni, then Baghdad bureau chief, helped recover Ayoub’s body. Then there’s Sami Al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 and held at Guantanamo Bay for six years. Al-Hajj claims that he was beaten and force-fed prior to his release, without charge, in May 2008. In January, during the war in Gaza, the network was the only TV newscaster with reporters on both Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict.

Burman seeks to turn skepticism about the network’s point of view into a benefit. “We aim to appeal to viewers who get tired of Western or American perspectives and want a more global view of the world,” says Tony Burman, managing director of al-Jazeera English.

MSNBC executives must be very worried that their network will be abandoned by viewers who want to watch a real anti-American network instead of a cheap knock-off.

Source: Forbes via Accuracy In Media

Tagged as: Al-Jazeera, anti-American, islam, MSNBC, muslim

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