MIDDLE EAST: Al Jazeera insists that if something is newsworthy, it goes on air, writes Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
If George Bush spent less time with sycophantic advisers and more watching the Al Jazeera television channel, he would understand the Arab world better and might have a chance of salvaging something from his Iraqi venture.
This was the advice given to the president recently by a columnist in the New York Times.
Eight years after its foundation, Al Jazeera (in English "The Island" or "The [Arabian] Peninsula") is the dominant media outlet and voice in the Arab world, admired and, in some cases, despised in the West and the Middle East alike.
Started and to a significant extent maintained with funds from the Emir of Qatar, the satellite channel has spent most of its short life in the eye of the political and military storm.
Most recently, the station has been heavily criticised for broadcasting video-taped messages, generally of a threatening nature, from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and from the various groups in Iraq which have kidnapped US soldiers and immigrant workers.
Speaking to me this week in the Qatari capital, Doha, Al Jazeera's editor-in-chief, Ahmed Sheikh, responded robustly to the criticisms. On the broadcasting of the al-Qaeda tapes, he said: "They are a party in the present conflict in the world, between what President Bush chose to call 'the axis of evil' and the axis of good. So if they are characterised as such, then they are a party to a conflict and they have a point of view, despite the fact that they are considered to be evil by President Bush, and not all the world necessarily agrees with that.
"So this is why we feel that sometimes if they have something that is really newsworthy, we've got to put it on air. The last tape that was broadcast by bin Laden offering a truce to Europe: this was real news. We put it on air and this is how we always put it, in a news context. We do not broadcast it as if we were giving him a platform to give out his opinion or promote his point of view. After we put it on air - and in most cases we edit it, we take what is newsworthy - we bring people to comment on it and give the other point of view."
As far as the other tapes of kidnapping or hostage-taking were concerned, he said if Al Jazeera did not broadcast them, some other news organisation would.
"We do not go and seek these tapes, they come to us. Why do they come to us in particular? Because we are there in Baghdad [in the Al Jazeera bureau], we speak the same language and people there trust us. Again, we put it in a news context. So I think what we are doing is justifiable and we are not giving them a conduit to the rest of the world. But they are there."
As well as arousing the ire of the Bush administration, the Arabic-language network has also been criticised by some of its viewers for broadcasting interviews with Israeli representatives. It has upset several governments in the region; Mr Sheikh reeled off the list.
"We are not allowed to operate in Saudi Arabia nor in Kuwait nor in Bahrain. In Sudan we had a bureau but they arrested our correspondent there and put him in jail."
He paused to reflect: "Algeria, just two weeks ago, prevented our correspondent from working." A correspondent in Spain is accused of involvement with al- Qaeda ("The charges against him are baseless," says Mr Sheikh).
On a more positive note, Syria and Tunisia have indicated a willingness to allow Al Jazeera to set up bureaux. "Before we agree to any of these places, we always discuss it and study the whole thing very carefully, whether we will we just sharing 'handshake material' or will be allowed to work as we would like."
Mr Sheikh spoke to me during a conference in Doha which was organised by Al Jazeera for journalists and other media representatives from all over the world, including the US (most notably the conservative TV channel Fox News), the UK, China, Russia, Japan and, of course, the Middle East.
Representing the UK Ministry of Defence was Lieut Cmmdr Stephen Tatham, who was the spokesman for Britain's Royal Navy during the Iraqi war last year, based in Bahrain.
He told me that the MoD recognised the importance of Al Jazeera and other more recently-established channels in the region such as Al Arabiya.
"We want to engage with them as fully as possible. There's no secret that there have been differences of opinion between the Ministry of Defence and Al Jazeera in the same way that there have in the past been differences between the BBC and the MoD, for example. But the bottom line is that we recognise the huge and influential audience that they have and we seek to engage with them at every possible level, hence my attendance here."
He revealed that an Al Jazeera team may even be "embedded" with a British military unit in Iraq in the near future, which he described as "a major step forward". He added: "It is at times a slow process and one of the reasons for that is we still don't quite understand the Arab media in the way that we have a degree of familiarity with the British or European media, but we're working very hard to get through that problem and to engage with them."
On the controversial issue of Al Jazeera broadcasts of video-tapes by al-Qaeda, he said: "Nobody in the British military or the Ministry of Defence in any way condones al-Qaeda at all, just the opposite. However, we recognise the value of Al Jazeera and other channels as an outlet for free expression."
Another conference delegate, Mr Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the Paris-based World Editors' Forum, compared the emergence of a free press in Europe in past centuries with the development of Al Jazeera.
The "respectable" elite condemned these papers for their lack of restraint and balance and similar criticisms were now being made of al-Jazeera. The criticisms were misplaced: "It's a very young network and, at the beginning, it's normal that they commit mistakes." People should be more tolerant and it was unreasonable to demand the standards displayed by CNN or the BBC, which had a great deal more experience.
While accepting that Al Jazeera executives denied the channel was essentially a political project, Mr Pecquerie said nevertheless the satellite network was "unifying Arab public opinion".
This was the dream of Arab nationalists in the 1950s and there were echoes of this in, for example, Al Jazeera's code of ethics. He praised the calibre of the staff, who came from all over the Arab world, including several countries where press freedom was definitely not encouraged.
"Al Jazeera is like a light in the darkness for all these journalists," Mr Pecquerie said.
Much of the network's popularity derives from its no-holds-barred phone-in talk shows, which are shaking up the old order in the Arab world.
Mr Mawafak Tawfik told fellow journalists who were visiting the Al Jazeera studios in Doha: "The phenomenon is quite new in the Arab world. In fact, some people say that what made Al Jazeera famous is not so much the news but the debate programmes.
"For the first time in the Arab world, people saw two opposing views being put across without any restrictions, no government censorship or anything, because governments could exercise censorship on the printed press, but on live television somebody calls in on the phone and says what he likes, nobody can stop him."
If President Bush were watching Al Jazeera, as the New York Times recommends, he would need an Arabic interpreter, but there are plans to establish an English-language channel next year.
There is already a website in English at english.aljazeera.net and a new documentary film, Control Room, chronicles the network's approach to covering the Iraqi war. Like it or not, Al Jazeera is here to stay.