There was something almost forlorn about Al Jazeera English’s coverage of the U.S. election Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. It was a bit like watching a local college TV station try to compete with the big boys—no matter how hard they try, it’s just not the real thing.
Make no mistake, AJE is not supposed to be CNN. Its mission is very different from that of the other English-language global news channels: to consider things through the prism of the developing world. By that measure, it failed, and what it did produce just wasn’t very good.
Where CNN was, literally, beaming holographs of its correspondents onto a set worthy of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, AJE anchors Ghida Fakhry and David Foster sat huddled in their coats on a rooftop overlooking the White House, looking like they wished someone would bring them a hot chocolate.
More important, there was a strange lack of gravitas to the AJE election team. Correspondent Rob Reynolds, a U.S. network veteran who has done an excellent job covering Obama, continued to produce yeoman work from Chicago. But where was everyone else? It was like the A-team had the day off. Random people would occasionally pop up – Josh Rushing made a cameo from Texas; we briefly saw Mike Hanna – but there was no continuity, no sense of a whole, no sign that AJE was taking this event seriously. Or that coverage had been planned with any vision.
CNN benefited from what it endlessly told us is “the best political team on television,” and the BBC tapped experts such as Ted Koppel and former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton. AJE, meanwhile, depended for analysis almost solely on former CNN White House correspondent Charles Bierbauer – brought back from obscurity in academia – and, a bit bizarrely, had U.S. political blogger John Nichols on the cavernous and seemingly abandoned set in Doha (yes, Doha, as in Qatar, 8,000 miles from the story), where Kamahl Santamaria was struggling with the slow and – in contrast to ones deployed by CNN and the BBC – dated-looking electoral map on the video wall (that they were not in the U.S. was never overtly acknowledged during my channel surfing).
Bierbauer, the dean of journalism at the University of South Carolina, and Nichols, a contributing editor at The Nation, both know their stuff. But during my lengthy viewing of the channel, the audience never had any way to know that. No onscreen ID, no verbal intro, nada. I had to Google Nichols to figure out who he was.
Meanwhile, AJE just didn’t advance the story. Where the other channels looked forward in their coverage, AJE seemed stuck in a time-warp. While other channels were making projections, the lower third on the AJE screen told us, “Economy top concern for voters.” No kidding.
On CNN, correspondents around the country interviewed top campaign officials; big-name political operatives, like Democratic consultant James Carville, parsed voter patterns in obscure corners of Ohio for their significance. The BBC roundtable explained developments in language the global audience could absorb. Meanwhile, AJE’s field reporters focused on yesterday’s news, endlessly asking McCain and Obama supporters why they voted for their candidate. Or the channel aired pre-cooked features on things like blacks in the U.S. struggling to get by. Been there, done that, guys; let’s move on.
Barnaby Phillips, one of AJE’s star correspondents, must have felt like screaming that at the executive producer – if there was one. Across the broadcast spectrum, the historic night pulsated with excitement. Other correspondents were shouting to make themselves heard over the roar of the crowd while poor Phillips stood all evening in front of some sort of government building in Columbus, Ohio, with nary a human being in sight. Boorrring. Actual exchange at 8:20 a.m. EST: “What’s happening, Barnaby?” “Not much…”
At times, it all had the feel of a Jerry Lewis Telethon. The low point came when Foster urged viewers to e-mail their friends in the U.S. to tell them to watch online. Memo to staff: Don’t beg.
Lawrence Pintak sounds like someone who has grown up eating junk food suddenly being forced to eat organic vegetables. He just can't see the value in a product that doesn't provide that familiar saccharine hit.
To adapt one of his criticsms of Al Jazeera, why not ask whether CNN's hologram managed to "advance the story"? (and how many lost their jobs in order to fund that tasty but essentially pointless technology?) Did the relentless branding of commentators as "the best political team on television" really make it so?.
One of the founding principles of Al Jazeera has been to eschew the populist and glitzy techniques that have come to increasingly dominate TV news at the expense of real content. Indeed, our aim is explicitly not to leap on the populist bandwagon of infotainment. The people we talk to are not measured by their branding, or the effusions of a top PR team; our locations are not ranked according to how closely they resemble the bridge of the Starship Enterprise or the set of a Broadway show.
Al Jazeera presented a comprehensive reflection of how the rest of the planet regarded these elections. If this majority failed to express appropriate awe at the true majesty of U.S. democracy, and television technology, it was not our task to fill in the gaps with pageantry.
Posted by teymoor nabili on Wed 12 Nov 2008 at 11:54 PM
the best coverage of the elction night was on aljazeera english ,of course it didnt care about the numbers much cos they are not usa channel but they did care about very important issues like immigration and others so it was very good channel that night
Posted by mark on Thu 13 Nov 2008 at 07:57 AM
I watched the election coverage from Limerick City Ireland. We watched for between 4 and 5 hours. In that time we flicked between, CNN, BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera and RTE (Irish station). I can understand the criticism above but I wonder in some ways how do most viewers watch these things. With such a choice of channels, we tended to switch regularly back and forth. Thus I missed some of what Lawrence talks about above but I did see a rooftop discussion live from Tehran, on significance of victory which was different. I think the idea of locking into one channel for the night is unlikely so in some ways having a range of items and hoping some will stick is more effective. I found the studio analysis at CNN interesting but not riveting by any means.
Posted by Shane on Sat 15 Nov 2008 at 06:47 AM
Lawrence Pintak is an American? Because his butt's dying to see all news outfits to cover the US elections with that furious zeal. There are many other countries in the world than the US.
Posted by Carlos on Wed 19 Nov 2008 at 11:56 PM