Finally! Some national love for Al Jazeera English

You know I've gone on (and on) about the English-language channel from the Arabic news giant al-Jazeera for more than two years. I did a big blowout on it in the summer of '07 and was thrilled when it started streaming 24/7 on Livestation, where I monitored its unparalleled coverage of the Gaza situation.
Today my buddy David Folkenflik at NPR devoted a segment on "Morning Edition" to a story about AJE, prompted by an awareness campaign the channel has been running to get people to call their cable or satellite operators and yell, "I Want My AJE!" (Besides featuring yours truly in a couple of places on that website, I notice they use a picture of the Kansas City Royals' John Buck at Yankee Stadium trying to tag out Robbie Cano. Thanks for the shout-out, guys!)
As nice as all the media attention is, I'm not sure it's enough, though. Here's why.
Back in 1996, I reported a story for the New York Times about the fledgling new channel from Rupert Murdoch called Fox News, as part of a wider profile of cable news channels. (Now there's a fun memory -- especially the part where then-private citizen Michael Bloomberg buttonholed publisher Arthur Sulzberger at a party and demanded to know why his Bloomberg TV hadn't been included in the profile ... which led to a nervous phone call to me from my editor ... to which I replied, "Well, Jane, because you didn't ask me to do a profile of business news channels." A story devoted to Bloomberg and CNBC soon appeared in the Times.)
And it was while reporting that piece that I learned Murdoch had done the reverse of what a cable programmer normally does. In the usual scheme of things, a cable operator pays a programmer for the right to carry its channels. Murdoch paid the operators to put his Fox News Channel on their systems. He reportedly made a one-time payment of as much as $7 per subscriber, which would work out to more than $2 million to get Fox News on in Kansas City alone.
Murdoch wasn't alone in paying for placement; as I wrote in a subsequent piece for the Times, the people running HGTV did the same at that channel's launch. The subscribers did the rest. Within a year I was hearing from readers out in the boonies wondering when the liberal media was going to let them have their Fox News. Soon cable operators not so fortunate to have Murdoch showering money on them were negotiating with him to carry his channel. Needless to say, the money train was no longer going in reverse by then.
I've thought about that story when considering Al Jazeera English. The emir of Qatar has spent a lot of money to get that channel on the air. AJE has doubled its coverage in the past two years and now reaches nearly 140 million homes worldwide. But almost none in the U.S. and Canada. Two exceptions are Toledo and Burlington, Vermont, and I think it speaks damningly to the nature of corporate-owned media in this country that the two cable systems in the U.S. that carry Al Jazeera English are locally owned and operated. (Some inside-the-Beltway locales also get AJE piped in -- notably the Pentagon.)
Tony Burman, the new chief of AJE, is determined to overcome this, and other than dispensing the occasional insult about the audience he's trying to woo, seems to be doing the right things. He replaced some of the British executives whose stereotypes about Americans caused its highest-profile anchor, Dave Marash, to quit in protest. He launched the IWantAJE website and media campaign to speak to the corporate cable media in a fashion they understand.
But I think he may still have to pay to play. The world news TV market is a stubbornly slow-growth market here in the U.S. It's not just AJE struggling for carriage; BBC World and France 24 would like to be carried coast to coast, but they just can't get corporate cable operators interested. And let's face it: Money is tight in that business right now. So I would encourage him -- and will when I talk to him in an interview -- to bring this matter up with the emir and see if he can't shake loose a few mil to get AJE in some big-city markets, even if only on digital cable.
It's a good channel. And no matter what the Israelis say, their spokesmen are fixtures on AJE, and more importantly -- it's carried all over Israel! People there watch it. Would that Americans watched this channel that they seem to already know so much about.