Well, it sounds like you just found yourself a great business opportunity!
It’s not just the demand you need, you also have to convince enough sponsors to put their ads on the channel too.
In my area, Al Jazeera is on a non commercial group of stations ,Link TV. They carry Democracy Now, Thom Hartmann, Al Jazeera, a German News Station , Deutsche Welle Journal, Mosaic, news from the middle east from the viewpoint of every country in the M.E., Grit Tv, Riz Khan, and others including news from the gay and lesbian viewpoint. It is viewer supported.
I’ve watched a fair bit of Al Jazeera English and it’s not bad. It’s not as good as the BBC News channel in general but does offer better coverage of Middle East issues, and it’s much better than Russia Today (which is trying to be propagandistic but hasn’t got the hang of it yet) or CNN (which is news for the ADD-afflicted).
I’ve also heard (but have no evidence to support) that the AJ Arabic channel has a much stronger anti-Western bias. Anyone have any facts on that?
Ok.
AJ is not offered on the cable network that services my area.
PBS has commercials (I think) on my system. Definately the History Channel, AMC, TLC, Discovery Channel, and other “educational” channels all have commercials. (CSPAN doesn’t.)
I figured AJ would be following the PBS model.
I looked at my cable provider (Videotron) and Al Jazeera English is available to digital cable suscribers like me either à la carte, or as part of some of their channel packages, including the “News” package (which is Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, CNBC, HLN, Investigation Discovery and MSNBC). The News package is $7.09/month.
The “big three” cable news networks (CNN, MSNBC, and Fox) get extremely small ratings compared to any sporting event, prime time comedy or drama, game or variety/competition show out there. I think sometimes there’s under 1 million people at a time watching CNN or MSNBC, maybe even under 800,00 at a time.
Out of probably 280m+ regular TV viewers in America, I imagine Al-J in its English form would have less than 20,000 viewers at a given time if it was available to everyone.
I’d wager in a poll 85-90% of Americans have no idea what Al-Jazeera is.
One of the points Josh Rushing (Al Jazeera correspondent) made in that talk I watched a couple years back was that the dollar guys at some of the cable providers didn’t even particularly like offering BBC News; they figured that the all-Tractor-Pull channel or whatever would generate more revenue.
It would be interesting to see whther it was, indeed, an SDMB Lefty who made that comment. Are you sure it was not Clothahump? (Not that I wish to imply that it was Cothahump, only that he is a poster on the Right with a username beginning with “C”.)
Beyond that, the board is sufficiently laden with posters from the “Left” that there are probably myriad conflicting views among the “Left’s” posters, meaning that any specific comment from a Lefty poster needs to be checked before decribing it as a “Left” position.
A disclaimer at the end says that Israel never responded to their requests for access.
Simply for the sake of clarity, I do not think cable/satellite providers should be required to carry AJ English. I’m just surprised it isn’t available in the US given you have a strong ethic of freedom of speech, plus an educated population. I wouldn’t have thought the cost of carrying the channel to be significant.
But no, not compulsion.
Here it is. I don’t mean to single out cosmosdan–the point was that there is a widespread misperception of Al Jazeera. The view reflected in that offhand remark may well be the prevailing view in the US.
NO!
Why not?
I just want to say that as a Brit, nominally Christian, pro Israel person, I watch Al Jazeera often and find it fairly unbiased, interesting and very useful.
It does a job that other news channels have yet to fulfil.
Around here, you can’t even get BBC America until you get to the fourth tier (after basic, expanded basic and digital basic), a level it shares with Fox Business, the Military Channel, Oprah Winfrey, several ESPN channels and a few others.
Don’t forget that cable systems pay networks to carry them. I can imagine a system’s subscribers screaming if their basic cable fees were going to pay for AJ.
Why isn’t the OP agitating for many more news sources to be carried? How about the CBC? Israeli TV? I know there’s at least one Japanese news program broadcast in English.
Its been a while, but IIRC they interviewed some serving Merkava Tankers, including a very pretty female, which is why I remember.
While I won’t argue here that the Land of the Free should make its media less free, there is a certain fallacy:
But isn’t it possible that part of the reason the market isn’t there, is because few Americans are exposed to Al-Jazeera?
I don’t know if foreign movies are generally “better” than American movies, but I enjoy watching them for a change, just because they’re so different from American films. Yet even the best foreign movies can be very hard to find in America whether in theatres, TV, or rental shops. (One of the heights of American hypocrisy was “free trade” negotiations under Clinton which forbade government subsidy of domestic films. The claim was that such subsidies discourage diversity when instead the exact opposite is the case: Filmmakers like Disney already dominate worldwide, so the effect was to increase American dominance, not “diversity.”)
That made me snort out my drink! I always assumed the OP was Curtis Lemay’s neighbor down the street.
I don’t have a television provider, so I am fine that it already is available widely on the medium I could watch.