Respected British interviewer David Frost agrees to join the English-language version of al Jazeera.
He's happy, anyway:
"I love new frontiers and new challenges," Frost, 66, said yesterday from London. He said the new network, al-Jazeera International, has promised him "total editorial control" and that he had checked out the company with U.S. and British government officials, "all of which gave al-Jazeera a clean bill of health in terms of its lack of links with terrorism."
Well, as long as he'll be stretching himself, I guess that's what matters.
But of course the notion that because the network has no direct links to terrorism (although credit to Frost for bothering to check) it therefore merits a "clean bill of health" still strikes me as unbelievably naive. We all agree this a war of ideas, of ideology, of hearts and minds, do we not?
Now, the counter-argument, without a doubt, is that if that's the case, then all to the good to have those who are not viscerally anti-American and anti-Western on the network.
Several questions: first, does "total editorial control" extend to all aspects of production? such as editing? (Will Frost control what images are shown while he is speaking?) Will Frost control his time slot, how (and whether) his show is promoted?
Will Frost's show be promoted to those in the Islamic world who have heard of al Jazeera, but don't speak Arabic, and therefore don't have access to the original? or will it be used to whitewash the original al Jazeera to the non-Arabic speaking world, so that the Western world will say, "but we've seen al Jazeera, and it just isn't as bad as the Americans say?" Who truly is the audience for an English speaking al Jazeera? Has anyone asked what the goal of this project is? Because precisely the kinds of things that make al Jazeera so popular in the Arabic world -- extremely graphic footage of violence in the Palestinian territories, or violence in Iraq -- would not be likely to be particularly acceptable to large mainstream audiences in Britain or America. By definition if they want to go mainstream, the product will have to change.
What, precisely, is the point of this project? Is anyone asking?
This, by the way, is enormously entertaining:
Frost said he had seen a script for a promotional tape that contains some supportive comments from Bill Clinton. Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said these must have been taken from a recent al-Jazeera interview with the former president, and that since Clinton never does commercial promotions, his office would send a cease-and-desist letter if the network used excerpts for that purpose.
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