By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist

In an op-ed published in the Boston Globe yesterday, a woman appointed by President Barack Obama as the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is calling on American cable and satellite providers to offer access to the notoriously anti-America and anti-Israel Al Jazeera English.

In her op-ed, Juliette Kayyem praises Al Jazeera for its “masterful coverage” of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, calling them a “news heavyweight in most of the world.”

“For the past few weeks, a parallel plot line to the revolutions in the Arab world has been playing out in the media,” Kayyem writes .”With rare exceptions, the largest American cable and satellite providers simply do not provide viewers access to Al Jazeera English (AJE), the cousin to the powerful Qatar-based world news network. AJE has launched a full-fledged campaign – including advertisements quoting, of all people, major US news figures – to convince cable carriers to open their programming. But most have declined: Burlington, Vt., is the closest city to Boston where viewers can see the network on television.

“AJE’s battle with the cable carriers is major news in the Middle East. Not carrying the network sends a message to the Arab world about America’s willingness to accept information, unfiltered, from the very region we spend so much time talking about. These television wars began not in Tunisia or Egypt, but in Iraq.”

She goes on to describe how President George W. Bush created a station called Alhurra, which means “the free one” in Arabic, to broadcast unfiltered news about the outside world into the country. It was intended to provide a different worldview from other Arab outlets such as the Saudis’ Al Arabiya and the Qatar-based Al Jazeera with the intention of cutting “through the barriers of hateful propaganda,” he said during his 2004 State of the Union address.

Unfortunately, nine days after President Obama took office in 2009, he chose to give an interview not to Alhurra, but to Al Arabiya, which Kayyem praised as the “signal of a new relationship with the Arab world.”

At the present time, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision andDirecTV do not carry Al Jazeera English. The Dish Network carries Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera Sports, but not the English channel.

The news agency is hoping that its coverage of the Egyptian crisis, which enjoyed a 2500 percent increase in its website traffic over the past few weeks, with 50 percent of that coming from the U.S, may finally convince U.S. cable companies to take them on.

“I sincerely hope now is the turning point,” Al Anstey, the managing director of Al Jazeera English, told The New York Times.

Another official confirmed that talks with US distributors are ongoing. “This remains a priority market for us and we’re hopeful that the high numbers of people in the U.S. watching us online will be an indication to cable operators that there is a strong demand for the channel.

Even though some liberal media personalities, such as ABC’s Sam Donaldson, gave the station high praise for its coverage of the Egyptian crisis, taking on Al-Jazeera is not something U.S cable companies appear anxious to do.

When asked about their plans just a few weeks ago, none of the major cable outlets were willing to make comments. Instead, they issued statements saying they have to balance the requests of many channels that want space on an already-crowded line-up of channels. As a result, Al Jazeera English has full access in only a handful of cities: Washington D.C., Burlington, Vt. and Toledo, Ohio.

Cable companies have good reason to hesitate about introducing such a network to an American audience.

“AL Jazeera is filled with anti-American propaganda,” writes Ed Lasky at the popular American Thinker blog. “It is also awash in anti-Semitism. The material broadcast stokes terror and violence. We have enough terror apologists in the media already without an entire station devoted to obscuring the truth being beamed into America’s homes.”

For the time being at least, it appears that  Al-Jazeera English will remain shut out of the U.S. market.

© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace®  http://www.womenofgrace.com