Al Jazeera seizes its moment in spotlight

Just as CNN proved to be the voice of the First Gulf War, coverage of the Arab revolutions has cemented Al Jazeera's place on the global stage.

The Qatari news channel's global audience rose after its coverage of the Tunisia uprising and subsequent rumblings in Egypt. Fadi al Assaad / Reuters

The Qatar broadcaster Al Jazeera is experiencing its own "CNN moment": just as CNN proved to be the voice of the first Gulf War, coverage of the Arab uprisings has cemented Al Jazeera's place on the global stage.

And after years of animosity, the network is gaining greater acceptance in the US, the home of its American counterpart CNN.

In the early 1990s, CNN became a pioneer of 24-hour war coverage. Reporters such as Peter Arnett and Charles Jaco made their names - as well as CNN's - in their live reporting of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war.

"Conventional wisdom is that CNN was made by the First Gulf War," says Dr Matt Duffy, an assistant professor who specialises in new media and journalism at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. "Nobody had done that, to air 24-hour coverage from a war zone."

Frank Sesno, the former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, told The Washington Postunrest in the Arab world could prove as important to Al Jazeera.

Dr Duffy says "the coverage of the Egypt uprising is adding weight to a network that was already burnishing its credentials".

Despite this, Al Jazeera faces a particular challenge in the US. Since its launch in 1996, the broadcaster's Arabic-language news channel has faced several, often contradictory, political attacks. It has been called a "mouthpiece for Bin Laden" because of its perceived anti-American bias; it has been accused variously of being a front for Mossad, the CIA and Saddam Hussein; and some have alluded to it as being a Zionist conspiracy to dismantle the Arab world.

How times change. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have propelled Al Jazeera into the international spotlight and many of the headlines have been positive.

Wadah Khanfar the director general of Al Jazeera, recently wrote a comment article for The Washington Post and addressed the renowned TED conference in the US.

Remarkably, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, came out to praise the station - something that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Criticising US media outlets, Mrs Clinton reportedly said "viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news".

The Arab uprisings have had a huge impact on Al Jazeera's online viewership in the US.

According to the channel, viewers of the online feed for its English channel increased by 2,500 per cent to 4 million in the first two days of the Egyptian protests. About 1.6 million of them were reportedly from the US.

Even so, Al Jazeera still does not have a prominent place in the US. While the channel launched in Canada and in a handful of US states in 2009, it has found it virtually impossible to win space on US cable and satellite networks.

Tony Burman, the managing director of Al Jazeera English, told Associated Press last year that the channel had faced "very aggressive hostility" from the Bush administration, but added that: "We're really determined to make a breakthrough in New York."

Since the uprisings, it has been reported that Al Jazeera English has been in talks with the cable giants Comcast and Time Warner over wider distribution in the US.

Ali Jaber, the dean of the Mohammed Bin Rashid School for Communication at the American University of Dubai, says the network is in a situation to seek wider distribution in the US.

"I think Al Jazeera should capitalise on its new-found fame and new-found favour in the US," says Mr Jaber. He added that the "US government should put its money where its mouth is" in easing the alleged hostility towards Al Jazeera in the US.

But Mr Jaber said Mrs Clinton's praise of the network could have been disingenuous.

"I think Al Jazeera and Hillary Clinton are two faces of the same coin," he says. "It's like old enemies that end up liking each other. Hillary Clinton, by praising Al Jazeera, she is trying to give credibility to herself, by praising her enemy."

An ulterior motive could have been to diminish the root causes behind the uprisings against pro-American Arab regimes, Mr Jaber adds.

"They are trying to reduce this whole thing to a media hoopla," he says. "It is a malicious way of trying to deny the real cause of it. This is a real revolution, not an Al Jazeera revolution."

The complex politics behind Arab-American relations will decide how this "real revolution" is televised in the US - and whether the victory will be that of Al Jazeera, or the likes of the all-American CNN - or even its bitter, rival Fox News.