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The Global News War

By Marcel Rosenbach

For over a decade, BBC World and CNN have dominated the global market in TV news. But now there's a challenge to the Anglo-American imperium. Al-Jazeera will enter the international market with an English channel later this year and the French are also set to start broadcasts of their "CNN à la francaise."

It must have been one of the greatest moments in Dominique de Villepin's political life. In February 2003, as France's then-foreign minister, Villepin delivered a strident speech to the United Nations Security Council in New York opposing the American plan to invade Iraq. In a rousing speech he demanded further arms inspections instead of a war. The applause was like wildfire.

That evening, in his hotel room, came the anticlimax -- the major American news networks marginalized his speech and cut the scenes of applause from their newscasts.

Diplomatic sources hint that de Villepin's wounded vanity led him afterwards to push a project that had languished for years in France, namely the founding of a "CNN à la francaise." In November 2005 -- as prime minister -- he signed a contract with the heads of the public France Télévision and the private channel TF1 to establish the "Chaine francaise d'information internationale," or CFII for short.

Leading the new institution will be Alain de Pouzilhac. Until recently the leader of French advertising giant Havas, Pouzilhac knows the business of international image-making. Whenever he traveled abroad, he says, it bothered him that France had no voice of its own in international news -- unlike Germany, which funds and disseminates broadcaster Deutsche Welle around the world.

Now he's the leading French ambassador for TV news, overseeing €30 million in startup financing from the state and a yearly budget of €65 million. After a number of initial hiccups, he hopes to start broadcasting at the end of 2006, "between November 10 and December 10."

No less than Jacques Chirac has said -- a little belligerently -- that de Pouzilhac's mission was eventually to "fight on the front lines of the worldwide image war."

His aggressive tone isn't hard to understand. Recently CNN aired a report on the street protests in Paris with commentary saying the scene at the Place de la République sort of brought back "memories of Tiananmen Square." Of course, no one was killed in the French student riots this year. In Beijing, however, Chinese soldiers opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and massacred hundreds of people.

Battling Anglo-American dominance

De Pouzilhac wants to counter the Anglo-American dominance of world news with two channels aimed at opinion leaders in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. One station would broadcast only in French; the other would air 75 percent of its content in English. Despite the fact that only 2 percent of the world's population speaks the language of Voltaire, the idea of broadcasting exclusively in English landed with a thud at Elysee Palace. Quel Affront!

The French aren't alone in their apprehension of BBC World and CNN. The world is starting to see a real groundswell of new, transnational news networks, including:

• In the coming months, Al-Jazeera International, an English-language spinoff of the leading Arab network, is set to begin broadcasting. The Arab-language service has grown to include sports news and channels for kids.
  
• As a "counter-attack" (according the Britain's Guardian newspaper), the BBC World Service is planning to launch its own Arabic program.
  
• For six months now, the English-language Russia Today, 50 percent financed by the Kremlin, has been broadcasting.
  
• The first state-run TV station in Latin America, Television del Sur (or Telesur) has been broadcasting since July 2005 -- subsidized by countries including Venezuela (51 percent) and Cuba (14 percent).
  
•  There have been early talks in Nairobi for a similar continent-spanning channel in Africa.

"We are finding ourselves in a kind of media arms race," says Christopher Lanz, managing director of Deutsche Welle TV (DW-TV), who last month met with colleagues from other major news networks at a conference in Kazakhstan. Last year, Lanz's German channel, which is funded by taxpayers and the German Foreign Ministry, began broadcasting three hours of daily programming in Arabic. There are internal plans to increase to 12 hours a day by September.

With its early start, DW beat both the BBC and Russia Today into the Arab-speaking market. The Russians want to broadcast 12 hours of Arabic-language programming a day starting next January, and the French intend to compete by autumn 2007.

The battle for hearts and minds

"Arms race," "battle," "counter-attack," "image-war" -- the language of media globalization is no more accidental than the interest in Arabic markets. This information war has less to do with commercial interests than politics. Every network operates at a loss, except for CNN, and in global debates over issues like the Iraq war, Iran's nuclear program or the Danish cartoon riots, there's a struggle for the privilege of interpreting facts and promoting a view of the world. Or, as Ulysse Gosset, CFII's general director puts it: "A media presence in other countries has become as important as traditional diplomacy."

Cameras now compete with guns in the new cross-cultural war. The Netherlands recently blocked the Lebanese satellite channel al-Manar and Iran's Sahar TV1 because they were allegedly broadcasting anti-Western and anti-Semitic propaganda that openly promoted hate. France banned al-Manar in 2004.

Sometimes, all it takes is a single word to show the chasm between cultures. When a suicide bomber blows himself up anywhere in the world, he's referred to as a "terrorist," "martyr," or "freedom fighter" depending on the seat of the media service.

More than anything else, though, it was the unprecedented wave of patriotism on the major American news networks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that prompted defensive responses in the rest of the world. The idea was that if the US can push through its policies as a unilateral superpower, it shouldn't also have a monopoly on the news.

The rise of Al-Jazeera

Al-Jazeera, founded ten years ago in the small sheikhdom of Qatar, grew out of this niche during America's "War against Terrorism," which proved as vital for the Arabic channel as the 1991 Gulf War was for CNN. "How Arab TV Challenges America," was the subtitle of Middle East expert Hugh Miles' book last year on Al-Jazeera -- though the channel is just now starting to mount a challenge.

About a year ago, the company put up a new building next to its main broadcast center in Doha, Qatar. The building will house Al-Jazeera International. The studios are finished, plasma screens hang on the walls and phone and Internet cables have just been laid. So far it's the most expensive and ambitious assault ever staged on the Western "world news" establishment. The 24-hour English channel won't have much in common with the Arabic service -- or so, at any rate, is how it will seem.

The emir of Qatar is an enlightened despot who doesn't allow dissent but introduces one liberal reform after another in his tiny Persian Gulf state. He's financed the new English channel himself and wants to beat any Western competitors at their own game -- and, in some cases, with their own ex-employees. The head of the service will be Nigel Parsons, a British journalist who has spent a large part of his 30-year career at BBC radio. Lindsey Oliver, from CNBC Europe, will run the marketing side. The channel has even poached news anchors from the competition. BBC veteran Sir David Frost and CNN personality Riz Khan, among others, are under contract.

"Free of any national agenda"

The English service will broadcast from four main centers around the world -- Kuala Lumpur, Doha, London and Washington. The launch date keeps changing, but according to Parsons, "by the end of May the technical infrastructure should be ready." Then there will be a test phase. "We'll start as soon as we're done with that," he says, "-- in any case it will be in 2006."

Viewers in Germany can watch the new channel by satellite or cable. But there have been problems -- as expected -- finding distribution for the channel in the United States, the world's largest English-speaking market.

Al-Jazeera will hire around 100 employees to work in its Washington bureau on K Street, says Parsons. He admits that in America there has been "more skepticism and mistrust than anywhere else." The major cable networks are openly afraid of mass cancellations if they offer "the mouthpiece of al-Qaeda" as part of their programming packages. But the channel will still be available to many Americans -- either via the Internet or satellite television.

As for content, says Parsons, the channel doesn't want to "follow the agenda of politicians, like all the other networks, or broadcast the same pictures from G-8 summits." Instead, the service will use a diverse network of correspondents who hail from many regions of the world in an effort to appeal to people "who might be tired of seeing themselves only through Western eyes."

When asked if the former BBC man and his prominent colleagues are putting their careers on the line by making themselves dependent on the whims of a hard-to-read emir in the Middle East who could yank funding at anytime, Parsons counters aggressively. "On the contrary," he says, "we work free of commercial pressures and free of any national agenda."

But who will tune in? Is there even a demand for so much cross-cultural TV? Dependable numbers are hard to come by, but surveys can be disillusioning. An analysis by the University of Maryland showed that only about 1 percent of viewers chose al-Hurra -- a US-funded, Arabic-language service based in Virginia -- as their favorite TV channel. This apparent ratings disaster has led to an expansion of the station's programming from 16 to 24 hours a day. Washington has also realized that al-Hurra might be a significant new way to spread radio and TV programming in Farsi. The target audience? Iran.