The Gaza war of 2008–09 was to Al Jazeera English what the first Gulf War was to a little-known satellite network called CNN. As the only international broadcaster based inside Gaza during the three-week Israeli onslaught, in which some 1,300 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed, AJE had the story everyone wanted but couldn’t get, since Israel had banned journalists from entering the war zone. AJE, unlike other international news agencies, had a permanent presence on both sides (Jerusalem is its largest foreign bureau), which meant it was already on the ground when the war started. Then it made the prescient, groundbreaking decision to give away its content to other networks for free, under the most lenient of Creative Commons licences.

The station’s coverage swept the globe, garnering accolades from international media, including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and even Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, in whose pages columnist Gideon Levy called the channel’s twenty-nine-year-old Gaza correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, “my hero of the Gaza War.” An American born to Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Mohyeldin had worked as a producer for CNN in Iraq before being headhunted by AJE. “There was plenty of opportunity for journalists to go into Gaza almost a week before the war,” he told me. “But they decided it wasn’t sexy enough or picture-rich or gripping.”

“Al Jazeera,” investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said at the Arab Media Forum in Dubai in May, “has broken the West’s monopoly on how the world views conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. Its coverage of Gaza was nothing short of remarkable. While most American people are still denied the right to view Al Jazeera, many networks were forced to carry its reports and images simply because they were so insightful. Gaza also proved, if needed, the objectivity and professionalism of Al Jazeera.”

Gaza also provided an argument for AJE’s campaign to enter North America, the last significant holdout in the English-speaking world. Views of video reports on the English website — launched in 2003, the same year it was hacked, in one of the largest-ever denial-of-service attacks, after posting photographs of dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians — jumped 600 percent, with 60 percent of those coming from the United States. Monthly visits to the site, meanwhile, rose to 22 million. That’s proof, Burman says, of the appetite for the channel’s reportage.

aje’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict may have put it on the map, but that same reporting is the chief source of opposition to the channel. “The introduction of an English-language Al Jazeera into Canadian homes can only provide yet another outlet for vicious anti-Israel propaganda,” Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, told the Jewish Tribune after Burman spoke at a Canadian Journalism Foundation event in February. “Al Jazeera may masquerade as an unbiased, neutral media outlet, but it is
fooling nobody.”

“The argument that Al Jazeera English should not be allowed in North America because it’s, quote, anti-Semitic, is bogus,” Burman says as our waiter brings another round. “I think they realize they have nothing on Al Jazeera English, so if they want to keep it out the only way to do it is through guilt by association.” Rather than letting matters lie, Burman met with Canadian Jewish leaders earlier this year in what Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, characterized as a frank exchange, and agreed to open a direct channel for them to communicate any concerns. The strategy worked. In the end, the CJC, which had lobbied vigorously against licensing Al Jazeera Arabic, chose not to oppose the English channel’s application to broadcast in Canada because, says Farber, his organization’s job is to reflect the community’s mainstream, and “we have people who feel both ways.” (B’nai Brith told the CRTC that in a “spirit of co-operation,” it had also decided not to challenge AJE’s entry into Canada, but added that it would remain vigilant.)

Having watched AJE during his travels in Europe and on the Internet, Farber found the channel no more alarming than the BBC (“which I have concerns about because of its depiction of Middle East issues”), and in fact welcomes Al Jazeera English’s coverage of under-reported places like South America and Sudan. “The largest of the albatrosses hanging around their neck,” he says, “is their name.”

Burman’s first year on the job has been a scramble to revive morale, which had stagnated under his predecessor, a former BBC executive who was part of a management team that staff privately dubbed the British Boys Network. A high-profile American hire, former ABC correspondent David Marash, had quit after being removed as the channel’s Washington anchor, and publicly criticized its British executives for relying on lazy anti-American stereotypes when covering issues like poverty in the United States.. “Al Jazeera English is an absolutely first-rate news channel, and if you’re interested in the world south of the equator it is absolutely dominant,” Marash told me. “What’s so heartbreaking to me is that the United States would be its weakest link.”

Marash’s analysis “has merit,” admits Burman. Better coverage of the United States from a “helicopter view” is a priority as the channel begins airing there — a prelude to what he believes is a turning point in the channel’s relations with the West. The limited entry of AJE into the US, and the station’s likely approval in Canada — which Canadians overwhelmingly supported with thousands of comments to the CRTC this spring — coincide with a cultural shift symbolized by Barack Obama’s decision to give his first presidential interview to the Arab network Al Arabiya in January, followed by his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo this June. Since then, attitudes in Washington have changed so dramatically that officials who used to regard being asked to appear on Al Jazeera English like an invitation to an al Qaeda training seminar are suddenly courting the network.

This shift, combined with the fact that Western media have essentially abandoned foreign correspondence, leaves AJE well situated to assume the sort of dominance it has already achieved in other parts of the world. And it may be — with a planned Canadian bureau and expanded coverage of the United States, including a new US-focused current affairs show hosted by Avi Lewis — that North Americans underserved even by domestic journalism will start looking to Qatar not only for news of the outside world, but to understand what is happening at home.

It’s World Press Freedom Day, an annual event organized by the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and held this year in Doha. In the crowded hallway outside the Intercontinental Hotel conference room, a hundred or so journalists and media freedom types mill about, exchanging business cards and revelling in one of the last places on earth where they are free to smoke indoors.

Tolerance is the theme of this year’s event — aptly illustrated by the bikini-clad women at the pool next to others in head scarves and full bodysuits. Even the surprise appearance of Flemming Rose, the editor who published the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, yields only mild indignation. And while conference organizers have a great deal to say about the “information explosion,” the rise of new media, and the need for everyone to just get along, the drastic decline in the amount of actual journalism being done is barely addressed.

It’s a subject of some obsession for one of the participants, Andrew Stroehlein, communications director of the International Crisis Group, a global non-profit that advises governments and intergovernmental agencies such as the UN, the European Union, and the World Bank on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict. An Anglo-American journalist in a natty suit, and a two-thumbed demon on his BlackBerry, Stroehlein churns out op-eds from his office in Brussels in an attempt to draw attention to forgotten wars. He worries that the plummeting budgets for foreign coverage mean more and more conflicts will fall into that category.

“People think there’s an information explosion,” he tells me while the rest of the participants feast on pastries during a break, “but what’s not being replaced is newsgathering by professionals.” And what of the assumption that everyone with access to the Internet or a camera phone will fill the gap? “Citizen journalism,” he says, “is like citizen dentistry.” Without trained journalists expending the time and resources to find out what is going on, the risk in places such as the United States — where the news can seem like an endless lunatic carnival in which the outside world doesn’t exist — is not only of becoming cut off from reality and developing skewed perceptions. (“That,” he says, “has already happened.”) The greater concern is what such an information vacuum permits. “You get away with things like Iraq because people don’t know what’s going on. That’s why these things happen.”