Al-Jazeera's challenge to Western cultural might
 

An ideological divide now compounded by a media divide. The news that the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television network has recently launched an English language channel to provide an 'alternative perspective to international news channels based in Europe and the United States,' to predominantly Asian audiences, prompts this reflection on the world's increasing divides.

The issue of an alternative media and an alternative perspective on news emanating from the West compels one to revisit the great, Third World-centered debates of the seventies and early eighties on the New International Economic Order and the closely connected New International Information Order. In those times, the principal global ideological battles were fought between the Cold War rivals, NATO and the Warsaw Pact on the one hand, and the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) and its detractors on the other.

Political supremacy

The Non-aligned Movement not only believed that it should steer an independent course in world politics but that it should also gain a measure of economic and cultural independence in the face of the fierce contest for global political supremacy waged between the Cold War rivals.

Thus, NAM and its supporters conceptualised a New International Economic Order, wherein global economic relations would be remoulded to meet its needs too and a New International Information Order, wherein there would be a balanced flow of news to the world media and the world's publics from all relevant sections of the world order, including the Third World.

The latter was seen as necessary because the Western news agencies enjoyed disproportionate power and influence and tended to distort, down play and even black out Third World news of importance which was seen as undermining Western interests.

NAM premised its power on its numbers and its unity but its program of confronting the superpowers and clinching better terms for itself in world political, economic and cultural relations came asunder mainly on account of an inability to work concertedly towards a common purpose. Nevertheless, when more and more Third World States considered it opportune to embrace the creed of economic globalisation, NAM's ideal of forming one big great 'trade union of the poor' on the basis of a balance between capitalism and socialism, inexorably came to naught.

Needless to say, with economic globalisation winning adherents from every ideological camp of Cold War times, these great debates of the past are now of little or no relevance.

However, these multidimensional battles of the past have been swept aside today by what is seen in some quarters as a "Clash of Civilizations". That is, the West vs Eastern religious fundamentalism, taking the form of an increasingly bloody, armed confrontation.

In this latest convulsive ideological confrontation too, a cultural dimension surfaces. That is, the power and influence wielded by the Western news agencies. Until the coming into being of Al-Jazeera, the Western news agencies, including CNN and Reuters, enjoyed unchallenged supremacy in news coverages and commentary, including those pertaining to the world's hottest spots, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where Western military supremacy is being challenged by indigenous groups, some of which tout religious slogans.

Al Jazeera

Accordingly, until the emergence of Al-Jazeera and its efforts at consolidating its influence in Asia, all "true" news and views on developments in our part of the world emerged from mainly the Western news agencies.

Accordingly, developments in Asian hot spots, came to be seen through the lenses of Western news agencies.

Al Jazeera's English channel poses a challenge to the cultural supremacy thus far exercised by the Western news agencies. This development needs to be seen as a fresh, new and hopefully credible challenge to the power thus far exercised by the Western world over the minds of the world's publics.

Hopefully, Al-Jazeera's efforts to "look at the world from an Asian perspective" would prove a reality. It can, nevertheless, count on the Western news agencies to put up the stiffest and even ugliest resistance to its presence.

lynn@sundayobserver.lk