Do not adjust your sets: An alternative view of the world

Set up 10 years ago by the Emir of Qatar, Al Jazeera has grown to become an influential antidote to the Western bias of the global media. Today it launches an English-language channel. Guy Adams reports

Lights, cameras, salaam. In the heart of old London, a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace, the inhabitants of a state-of-the-art television studio are preparing to make broadcasting history.

Today, the Arabic television network Al Jazeera launches one of the most ambitious television ventures of recent times: an English-language channel, to bring rolling news, from a Middle Eastern perspective, to a global audience of millions.

The new channel, Al Jazeera International, already boasts star quality. A host of big names, from Sir David Frost to former-BBC and ITV stalwarts Rageh Omaar and Darren Jordon have been poached from rival broadcasters.

Tony Blair is expected to provide the station's first major "scoop", having agreed to an exclusive interview on Friday's debut edition of Sir David's new weekly show, Frost Over the World.

In the US, meanwhile, AJI has signalled its intention to do battle with the mighty CNN, after poaching its sought-after Atlanta-based anchorman Riz Khan to front a daily news programme from Washington.

The channel certainly has money to back up its ambitious aims. Bankrolled by the Emir of Qatar to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, it launches with a total of 18 bureaux around the world, and no less than five hundred staff of its own.

Four studios - in London, Doha, Kuala Lumpur and Washington DC - will allow AJI to "follow the sun," broadcasting around the world via satellite television and the internet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"This will be the last great adventure in TV news," says the station's Europe correspondent, Alan Fisher. "It sounds like a terrible cliché, but the world is getting smaller, and there's a huge untapped market that isn't served by a rolling news station. I'd put that potential audience in tens, if not hundreds of millions."

It's a bold claim, but Al Jazeera has made a habit of living up to the hype that has surrounded it since the original Arabic station hit the airwaves just 10 years ago.

That channel was launched on the back of a US$10m grant from the Emir of Qatar in 1996, after the BBC scrapped its World Service Arabic language station, in response to censorship demands from the government of Saudi Arabia.

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