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lets (they prefer the term 'patriotic'), chooses tobrand its product as 'real news, fair and balanced'.20I referred above to the fact that inJune 2004 Fox News repeatedly referred tothe torture oflraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib as 'allegations of misbehaviour'. Whilethe rest of the world's media were talking about torture and abuses of human rights
hardly less barbaric than those committed in the same prison by Sad dam Hussein'sregime itself, this phrase was a deliberate gesture of defiance, employed in the fullknowledge of the responses it would generate amongst supporters and criticsalike. Such deliberately tendentious terminology could not have been used byFox News's sister channel in the UK, Sky News, which exists and must compete
effectively in an environment defined by the impartiality ethic of public servicebroadcasting. This constrains it from adopting the gung-ho patriotism of FoxNews in tile US, where public service journalism is marginalised and the practiceof overtly opinionated attack journalism was long-established on radio before itmigrated to television.21
Outside tile US, in a world where AlJazeera communicates its take on eventsto hundreds of millions of Arab viewers, western-based outlets aiming to competein the global marketplace cannot be satisfied with propaganda of the type oncedisseminated by Radio l"ree Europe into the former Soviet Union, even if that iswhat proprietors might wish them to produce. For a profit-hungry, commerciallyfocused, globally targeted news media, speed and exclusivity are hugely important,and a scoop is a scoop, even if it involves American newspapers and satellite
channels telling the world about US troop abuses of Iraqi prisoners, or Britishmassacres of civilians in Basra.Commercial factors are also key to the success of AlJazeera in the transnationalsatellite news market. An Arab audience researcher argues that 'the primary factorin the transformation of the [Arab] media is that today we have a market-driven
media'.22 The desires of some, both in the west and in the Middle East, to suppresstile channel's fiercely independent stance23 are countered by the desire of itsgrowing ranks of commercial backers to reach an audience of Arab viewers - an'Arab street' which has grown used to independent journalism. In April 2005 itwas again being reported that the government of Qatar was investigating thepossibilities of privatising AI Jazeera. According to the Guardian newspaper,
consultants Ernst & Young had been employed 'to look into possible privatisationmodels'.24 The piece reported what had long been true - that hostility to AIJazeera's editorial approach from the US administration on the one hand, and localArab regimes on the other, was driving efforts to neutralise the channel by turningit into a commercially motivated operation, dependent on advertising from
the Saudis and other conservative governments. As this book went to press, thelong-term financial structure of AI Jazeera was unresolved, although it seemedreasonable to speculate that tI1e same popular pressures which make banningand violence ineffective as control tactics would hamper efforts to privatise the
radicalism out of it. If AI Jazeera's independent editorial stance, radicallypro-Islamic as it is, is genuinely popular, the cultural marketplace will ensure itsdelivery in one form or another. From this perspective the privatisation of AIJazeera, were it to happen, could strengthen rather than weaken its i