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Guernica Magazine: I Want My AJE (5/08) by Julia Dahl
Asked if Al Jazeera English staffers who "left jobs at places like CNN and the BBC" have been "disappointed that not a single major cable or satellite network in the United States has agreed to carry the channel. Comcast, Charter, Time Warner, Dish Network and DirecTV all passed," the station's Washington D.C. bureau chief admits he "knew that we’d be forced to look for non-traditional means of distribution."Indeed. Though approximately 120 million homes from Jerusalem to Jakarta to Germany tune in to AJE every day, the station has been all but shut out of the U.S. market. Unless you live in Burlington, Vermont, or northeast Ohio, where two local cable networks defied the industry by adding the channel to their line-ups, the only way to see the channel’s programming is on YouTube, or by paying for either a subscription broadband service or a satellite dish from French company GlobeCast.
And in Burlington, where local pressure had gotten the town's cable company to agree to drop Al Jazeera, the network is now hanging on by a thread.
See also TheAtlantic.com: Obama and Appalachia (5/22/08) by Matthew Yglesias for an example of how Al Jazeera English can broaden not only U.S. media coverage of the Middle East, but also of the United States itself.
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