Al Jazeera, wide angle

WASHINGTON —  Al Jazeera, praised for confronting the Middle East’s oft-coddled ruling regimes and criticized for bringing viewers regular updates from Osama bin Laden’s cave, says it is launching its new English-language international network today.

A lot of people don’t believe it.

“This is getting a little boring,” said one droll industry insider who asked not to be named. “Call me back when they actually get on the air.”

But after more than a year of delays, a reported $1-billion price tag and lingering questions about whether any U.S. station will carry its programming, Al Jazeera says it is, honest, ready for prime time.

“We are really, really launching,” said Will Stebbins, a Boston native and former Associated Press Television News journalist who is Al Jazeera International’s Washington bureau chief. “It’s going to be a very dramatic launch. We’re going to be live from some interesting locations.”

AJI promises to outshine its competitors -- such as CNN International and BBC World Service -- with a mix of high-definition bells and whistles and an unusual 24-hour news rotation -- four hours anchored from Washington, four from London, four from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and 12 from company headquarters in Doha, Qatar. In fact, one of the glitches that slowed the opening-day broadcast date is that AJI has gone digital, doing away with all tape and video, giving journalists desktop access to everything.

“There’s been a learning curve with the new technology,” said Stebbins. “It’s a paradigm shift.”

A paradigm shift would suggest a new technology, one so glorious to watch that viewers will soon abandon commercial television. An irony, to say the least, if AJI paves the way for a rejuvenated CBS or NBC.

“This is unprecedented; it’s the most complex project of its kind ever attempted,” said British journalist Nigel Parsons, AJI’s managing director. “With our high-tech backbone, involving all new software, firmly linked by fiber, we’ll be able to move pictures around the world.”

‘In a league of our own’

To lure viewers as well as space-crunched satellite providers, AJI will also air the same programming at the same time -- real-time television, really -- to viewers in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas.

“We will cover Asia from within Asia, the Middle East from within the Middle East, Europe from within Europe and the Americas from within the Americas,” said Stebbins, who captains a small army of 140 at a new high-tech studio on K Street in Washington. “There has been nothing like it before, so we believe we will be in a league of our own. It will be nothing short of a reversal of the global flow of information.”

For now, technology experts seem underwhelmed. “A fiber link. Good for them,” said Phil Swann, president of TVPredict- ions.com, a website that tracks the television industry. “They can load up their studio with every bell and whistle they want, but that doesn’t mean it ever gets in front of an audience. The very name Al Jazeera is a bigger obstacle than most cable networks have at launch.”

The new network is not expected to make a huge splash today on U.S. television sets -- though AJI may attract some U.S. viewers via broadband streaming on the Internet, and a French satellite company, Globecast, is offering to deliver the broadcasts to the U.S. audience. Insiders said negotiations between AJI and Comcast Communications collapsed Tuesday, all but dooming efforts to launch on most television screens in the U.S.

But network executives noted that the novelty, the drama, the passion of the thing is not necessarily to beam inward toward the United States but outward from Washington to English-speaking viewers through 40 million television sets around the world -- particularly in Western Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. And media analysts seem to agree.

“It’s not about us,” said Jon Alterman, who watches public diplomacy and the international media from his think tank perch at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But in a lot of the world that speaks English, Al Jazeera International will be a decentered take on how the world works. There’s a global media ecology out there which the United States has decreasing dominance over.”

American journalists recruited to join AJI are convinced that the English-language network will move beyond its Arabic roots, that it will be a quality program dedicated to in-depth journalism -- and that it will find an audience.

“We want to win the high end, to give the most sophisticated, more nuanced and most global view of the day’s events,” said David Marash, a former correspondent for ABC’s “Nightline” who became the first high-level American reporter to sign up in January, prompting Media- Bistro.com to dub him “Al Jazeera’s Jewish anchor.”

Marash does not flinch from the affiliation, or the irony. “I’m not shamed or troubled by being a Jew working for a company I believe spreads values across the Middle East that lead to peace and understanding,” he told the website.

Heavy focus on reporting

Shibley Telhami, a Mideast specialist at the Brookings Institution who was born into an Arab family in Israel, helped Al Jazeera with pilots for the show. He said the network’s market research showed “an international market in the English-speaking world that would be more from the perspective of the Arab world, in places like India and Pakistan.”

Created a decade ago with a $150-million grant from the emir of Qatar, Al Jazeera (in Arabic) is now the top-rated station in the Middle East, with more foreign correspondents in world capitals than all the U.S. networks combined. In an era when U.S. news budgets and ratings are shrinking, the emir is betting that a credible international presence will help change the network’s image as it rolls out a high-definition, multi-desk face of news. In the process, he hopes to turn Doha, the capital of a small emirate of about 863,000 people living in a Persian Gulf country roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, into an international news center to rival London, Moscow and Washington.

With deep pockets and a hunger to find global acceptance, AJI could also win an audience with the depth of its reporting.

“What we increasingly lack in television -- and the online world lacks it too -- is reporting,” said Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who often critiques the media. “Cable is all live shots. We have a premium on opinion. So if they do that perspective, that is potentially great.”

To prepare for the launch, Al Jazeera has been making the rounds in Washington, hoping to reassure top Bush administration officials that, despite its reputation for anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric, the new network will adopt Edward R. Murrow’s standard of truthful and in-the-moment reporting.

“We’re not abandoning the spirit of Al Jazeera journalism; we’re taking it to a higher audience,” Parsons said in a May interview. “We want to be a market leader, and that applies to technology, content and journalism.”

So far, American officials are undaunted by the prospect of a more high-profile Al Jazeera’s beachhead into world public opinion from Washington.

“It’s a big ambition,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, who met with network officials several times last spring. “Time will tell.”

A State Department official who did not want to be quoted by name said the Bush administration is of two minds about the new AJI. “Al Jazeera has an audience we need to talk to and an editorial stance that makes it hard to do that effectively,” he said. “The English Al Jazeera has the opposite problem: It might be more objective, but at this point it has no audience.”

johanna.neuman@latimes.com