Will Al-Jazeera win its war? It's not likely that protests from bodies such as the Canadian Jewish Congress will stop the CRTC licensing the currently illegal Arab station, James Adams writes,
Globe and Mail (posted at Canadian Jewish Congress), December 2, 2003
"You won't find Al-Jazeera, described almost ad nauseam since its creation in 1996 as "the CNN of the Arab world," in any TV Guide-type listing or on the digital-cable menus of Rogers, Shaw, Videotron and other big Canadian carriers. Indeed, it's illegal right now for anyone in Canada to carry the unexpurgated 24-hour-a-day Al-Jazeera signal, either via cable or DTH satellite ... Videotron, Quebec's largest cable company, and the Canadian Cable Television Association, which includes Rogers, want to change all this. Earlier this year, they asked the broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, to list Al-Jazeera and a dozen or so other "foreign-language" or "ethnic" channels as permissible viewing for Canadians. A decision is expected some time this month, and sources close to the CRTC say it's expected to be favourable. If so, it means the cable companies can soon begin negotiations with executives at Al-Jazeera, RAI International, Cine Latino, Romanian Television International and the rest to pull down their satellite fare and have it digitally distributed as specialty programming across Canada .. This will no doubt please many of the estimated 600,000 Canadians of Arab and West Asian origin who have been going to places like the Bloor West halal restaurant, with their U.S. satellite dish and other so-called "grey-market technologies," for the Al-Jazeera broadcasts. But it will prove irksome to organizations like the Canadian Jewish Congress, which has strongly opposed the addition of Al-Jazeera to the list of satellite services eligible for digital carriage. In the cover letter for its 37-page, Aug. 8 submission opposing the legal introduction of Al-Jazeera into Canada, the Congress argued that Al-Jazeera's "programming content contains hate propaganda, in contravention of Canadian laws and broadcast standards." Indeed, Jews on Al-Jazeera "are frequently characterized . . . as a duplicitous, corrupt, world-dominating conspiratorial force," the CJC said. Holocaust denial, too, is "commonplace" on the network. Authorizing Al-Jazeera for distribution places control of its content far beyond the reach of the CRTC. "That is why [the] application must be denied at the outset" .. Even the Canadian Jewish Congress, which argues freedom of speech is not "an absolute right," seems prepared for this eventuality if the penultimate page of its Aug. 8 report to the CRTC is any indication. There, the CJC says that if the CRTC allows Al-Jazeera on its digital distribution list, it should do so under three conditions: (1) it must be a dedicated subscriber-only service à la the Playboy Channel; (2) its licence should be for only 12 months at a time, with its broadcast distributors filing concerns and complaints from viewers to the CRTC every three months; (3) the service should be subject to a code of ethics analogous to what the Canadian Association of Broadcasters has for its members, as well as an enforcement mechanism similar to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council."