Al Jazeera signs on at convention

When President Bush officially accepted the presidential nomination, his speech went out live via a satellite channel many delegates had never heard of in a language most could not understand. But his words reached an audience of 35 million Arab-speaking viewers, who tune in to Al Jazeera.

“This is not the election of just any president,” said Hafez Al-Mirazi, the Egyptian-born Washington bureau chief. “We are not talking about a president of just a country in the Americas or a banana republic. This is the election of the most powerful leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, with great importance to the Middle East.

“Given the U.S. military presence in Iraq, and the role that the U.S. does play in the political process almost in every Arab country, trying to change governments and spread democracy, that makes the identity and the background and the philosophy of the guy who is coming to the White House significant and important for our audience,” he said.

The convention coverage has raised the profile of the almost 8-year-old Arab-language channel, which is already quite well known internationally, though not always due to favorable circumstances.

The station’s Afghanistan offices have been bombed twice by U.S. forces in incidents that U.S. officials have said were mistakes. A Baghdad correspondent was killed by a U.S. shell last year while broadcasting from a rooftop.

The Qatar-based channel, which has 32 bureaus and 500 employees, has been criticized by U.S. authorities for airing the taped pronouncements of Osama bin Laden, and its reporting on civilian casualties in the war in Iraq has rankled U.S. military authorities. On the other side, it has been accused by Arab governments of being used by Israel and the United States.

When Al Jazeera announced it would be broadcasting from the Democratic National Convention in Boston, it raised a few eyebrows. A few days after the channel set up its operation at the convention in July, officials there removed the Al Jazeera sign from its skybox.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you ask the delegates if they’d rather [see] a sign for Al Jazeera or Fox News,” Al-Mirazi recalled with a smile, as he hustled around the channel’s crowded Madison Square Garden workspace. After the Democratic convention got underway, staff waited for one official interview -- with a Kerry campaign spokesman, Mark Kitchens -- that never came through, according to Stephanie Thomas, a New York native with a PhD from Harvard in Arabic, who is the Washington bureau manager of Al Jazeera.

“They assigned us contacts, but nothing materialized,” Thomas said.

The channel instead turned to political speeches and other public events, she said, and a thorough approach that was noted by media critics. In contrast to U.S. broadcast networks, Al Jazeera has aired two to 3 1/2 hours a day from the conventions -- a total of 13 hours of political coverage in four days, Thomas said.

“In a way, the flap over the sign at the Democratic National Convention helped us. It put us on the map,” Thomas said. “The discourse shifted from the idea that ‘Al Jazeera, the terrorist network, has descended in Boston,’ to ‘Al Jazeera’s coverage in total hours has amounted to more hours than all the other news networks.’ ”

“When we first got to the Democratic convention, there was this shock and horror,” she said. “So we went from being viewed through sensational stereotypes to what we’re doing as a news operation.”

The Republicans initially refused permission for the sign as well, Thomas said, but four days later, they unexpectedly approved it. When the convention opened, the Al Jazeera logo was visible from the skybox -- sandwiched between skyboxes for Fox and Bloomberg -- and congressmen and officials began to accept interview requests.

The interviewees in New York have included congressmen such as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) and Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), she said, as well as administration officials such as Tucker Eskew and Dan Senor.

On Tuesday, Al Jazeera broadcast its weekly hourlong show “Race to the American Presidency” from the convention. On Thursday, Drier and Issa appeared on “From Washington,” another weekly show.

At the Republican convention, Al Jazeera’s workspace was crowded with monitors showing news on the hostage standoff in Russia, the war in Iraq and unrest in Israel.

Among the guests interviewed on Al Jazeera in New York was Amy Goodman, the left-leaning host of the public radio program “Democracy Now.”

“We focused a lot on civil liberties,” she said. “Arab Americans are particularly targeted and feel deeply about these issues.”

Goodman said the difficulties Al Jazeera has faced -- including the detaining of a reporter covering a Bush event in Crawford, Texas, and a monthlong closure of the Baghdad bureau -- made her even more concerned about speaking to the program’s audience.

“When you have an administration that so demonizes an outlet like Al Jazeera, it’s extremely important to speak to the Arab world,” she said. “It’s our job in the media to go where the silence is.”