The Most Hated Name in News

There are three forces shaping the world, an Arab reporter I met in the Gaza Strip once told me: money, women, and journalism.

On the first and third counts, he might have been thinking of Qatar, where I pass by luxury shopping malls, glittering real estate developments, and, in a spirit of reasonableness, traffic signs that advise caution when driving the wrong way down one-way streets. Over the past decade, this tiny desert emirate of a million and a half people — a bump on the rib cage of Saudi Arabia, directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran — has asserted itself on the world stage in large measure by pouring money into, of all things, journalism. Since 1996, it has been funding Al Jazeera (Arabic for “the island”), the network that revolutionized the Arab media and is poised to do the same for the English-speaking world.

Passing through the security gate, where a Yemeni guard gives my documents the once-over, I enter the air-conditioned headquarters of Al Jazeera English, the international news channel the network launched in November of 2006. Inside the sweeping high-tech production facility, cameras roll as a young Australian anchor opens a segment on the South African elections, then passes the baton to his co-anchors at the channel’s three other broadcast centres, in Washington, London, and Kuala Lumpur.

The managing director of this ambitious operation is on the second floor, above the fray. Tony Burman, the former news chief of CBC Television, has the sort of face that can appear to be scowling when in fact he is deep in thought. Most of the time, what he is thinking about is news — like today’s story by AJE’s Beijing correspondent Melissa Chan, who managed to gain entry to one of China’s secret “black jails,” where the government imprisons citizens who challenge its authority. It’s a classic AJE story: a local reporter familiar with the language and culture investigates a place where few foreign correspondents venture to any depth, focusing on the plight of ordinary people and putting the story into context for a global audience. This kind of intrepid field reporting is how Burman made his mark as a producer for Canada’s public broadcaster in the ’80s and early ’90s, when he covered conflict in South America, civil war in Sudan, Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa, and the famine in Ethiopia. His crew famously broke that last story for North American viewers, in the process discovering three-year-old Birhan Woldu, who became the face of international relief efforts like Live Aid.

From his spacious corner office, Burman keeps an eye on four television screens: Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English, and AJE’s two main competitors in the global news game, BBC World and CNN International (neither of which is broadly available in North America). Fumbling with the remote, he misfires, landing on what might be considered his arch-nemesis. “I come all the way to Qatar to watch Fox?” he says, bemused.

By the time Burman resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2007 after thirty-five years, eight of them as editor-in-chief, he’d had enough of an upper management he thought was turning CBC into a “B-minus version of Global,” the network owned by ailing media giant Canwest. He had become, he says, “less and less happy” with cbc’s Americanized direction (though not nearly as unhappy as he might have been had he stayed for the savage staff and budget cuts of late). “It was really time to leave.” Yet neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that a year later he would decamp halfway across the world to take on the greatest challenge of his career, lured by a fascinating — and unlikely — development in international journalism.

In less than three years, Al Jazeera English has emerged as the dominant channel covering the developing world. As the first worldwide news station to be based in the “global South,” it has an audacious mandate: to reverse the information flow that has traditionally moved from the wealthy countries of the North to the poorer countries south of the equator, and to be the “voice of the voiceless,” delivering in-depth journalism from under-reported regions around the world. With more than seventy bureaus run by staff drawn from some fifty nations, a typical news day for AJE might include reports on a nomadic camel-herding tribe whose members are key rebel leaders in Darfur, a lawsuit against Chiquita (formerly the United Fruit Company) for financing paramilitary death squads in Colombia, the effects of the global financial crisis on Pakistani carpet weavers, and the recent massive spike in arms sales to the United Arab Emirates. AJE currently broadcasts to 150 million households in more than 100 countries — with the exception, until now, of North America.

That’s where Burman comes in. A bred-in-the-bone journalist who started out in the late ’60s reporting for the Montreal Star, where his father was a news editor, he has a lifelong passion for foreign correspondence. Hired by CBC as a radio and TV producer in the early ’70s, he took a year off to freelance in South America before rejoining the network, where he eventually served as its European bureau chief, then moved into management. As head of television news, he was the kind of leader journalists were grateful to have on their side.

“When Tony left, people thought, ‘There goes the last great journalist in management,’” says Beth Haddon, an old friend and colleague of Burman’s who is an adjunct professor at the journalism school of the University of British Columbia. They met when both were senior news producers at CBC in the ’80s. “Tony really stood for something,” she says. “For quality journalism — that’s old-fashioned, of course — of fairness, balance, verification, public discourse.”

Burman had a reputation for defending his journalists when their reporting raised hackles. (His physical presence can be intimidating: “Give Tony a cigar,” one young Al Jazeera staffer told me, “and you could roll the cameras on a Mafia film.”) And he didn’t mind taking controversial positions if the facts backed them up. Such qualities stand him in good stead running not only AJE’s global news coverage, but also its campaign to break into Canada and the US, where cable and satellite carriers have been loath to associate themselves with a network that much of North America still considers Terror TV. The task of demolishing the misconceptions attached to the Al Jazeera brand is daunting. As Haddon warned Burman when he first floated the idea of leaving Toronto for Doha, the job sounded good, “but you’ll never have lunch in this town again.” Yet his move could hardly have been better timed, coming at a moment when the Western media are in a state of unparalleled crisis, undergoing the first seismic challenge to their dominance since the advent of television.