Stasiun TV Yang Tidak Merasa Perlu Berkiblat Ke CNN

Resensi oleh Robert Finn
Pertama kali dimaut di Bookreporter

Judul buku: AL-JAZEERA: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East
Penulis: Mohammed El-Nawawy dan Adel Iskandar
Penerbit: Westview Press
Tebal:
ISBN: 0813340179

As recently as six years ago no one had heard of the Arab-based TV network Al-Jazeera --- for the very good reason that it did not exist. Today it is arguably the world's most talked-about, argued-over, politically influential and cockily controversial news source. Based in the tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar, it has 35 million viewers, including about 200,000 in the United States.

It has been denounced as a sewer full of Anti-American vitriol, yet Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld have appeared on its talk shows, as have Tony Blair and Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. The authors of this fascinating study demonstrate that Al-Jazeera (variously translated as "the island" or "the peninsula") is just as controversial in the Arab world as it is in the West. A Saudi Arabian government official has accused it of serving up "poison on a golden platter" --- and bear in mind that tiny Qatar occupies a small peninsula right next door to powerful Saudi Arabia.

Two remarkable events made Al-Jazeera famous --- its broadcasting of three tapes of Osama bin Laden's anti-American rants and threats, and its presence as the only outside news source in Afghanistan during the early stages of the US-led coalition offensive that ultimately toppled the Taliban.

The authors of this book are both Egyptians who now teach at North American universities. They appear to have solid journalistic credentials and neither one ever worked for Al-Jazeera. They claim to be independent observers, though naturally writing from an Arab perspective. I could find no obvious evidence of bias or ax-grinding in their book. This is important to note in a book concerned with such a highly charged and politically volatile topic.

Westerners will be surprised to learn from El-Nawawy and Iskandar that Al-Jazeera actually is an offspring of the Arabic service of Britain's beloved BBC. There was a financial and journalistic disagreement that led to the defection of a number of the BBC unit's staff, who ended up being invited to set up shop independently in Qatar, a country smaller than Connecticut and with fewer people than San Francisco. Qatar's relatively liberal-minded government funded the station (and still does) but claims the network is totally independent of state control. El-Nawawy and Iskandar believe this to be true.

Al-Jazeera's answer to the torrent of criticism from the West is that it is simply doing an honest journalistic job --- presenting all sides of political issues in a part of the world where even allowing anyone with dissenting views to appear on your network is regarded as virtual treason. Al-Jazeera's model, its executives claim, is CNN. The network's motto is "the opinion, and the other opinion." It has, for example, suffered severe criticism and punitive measures for merely allowing Israeli officials to state their case on its talk shows. Since the authors of this book are both Egyptians, they understandably lay heavy stress on the uproar that Al-Jazeera's freewheeling style has caused in the Arab world.

What Western critics see as bias, El-Nawawy and Iskandar see as journalism that reflects an Arab point of view, just as CNN and the other American networks reflect a Western point of view. They urge the West to take fuller advantage of Al-Jazeera by having American officials present the Western case more fully than has been done in the past. Past appearances by Rumsfeld, Powell, Condolezza Rice, and a lower-level diplomat named Christopher Ross, they claim, have been only a small step in the direction the US must follow if it is ever to win over suspicious Arab states and peoples.

They also urge Al-Jazeera itself to find more moderate views instead of simply airing the most strident extremist voices they can find in talk shows that often resemble barroom brawls or boxing matches.

The core message of this book is that the West should stop mindlessly demonizing Al-Jazeera merely because it presents a point of view different from ours. Instead, they say, the West should take advantage of a unique opportunity to put its case to people brainwashed for decades by government-controlled media.