Exclusive to Al-Jazeera opens the second season of Wide Angle on most PBS stations Thursday night. The documentary looks behind the scenes at the news channel during the Iraq war.
While there have been many articles about the first independent Arab news channel, the program gives us a sense of the people who work there. In some ways, they seem not too different than the people who would be featured in a similar documentary on the BBC or CNN (many of them were trained in the west). They want to beat the competition. But there are also differences. The man who translates the comments of Bush, Powell and others from English to Arabic is Iraqi and has family in Bagdhad. The reporter who covers military briefings (which he calls "a waste of time") is a devout muslim who takes breaks from reporting to pray. And one reporter we meet in Bagdhad is killed when their office is bombed by the US.
On the Media had an interview with David Belton, the executive producer of the documentary.
Al-Jazeera is planning an English language version of the channel (and reviving the English language website which was up briefly during the war).
After the documentary, there will be an interview with Richard Haass, an advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Last year, I didn't think the interview segments added much and often wished the documentary was longer instead.
I'll be writing about next week's show on the Pakistani rock group Junoon. There are descriptions of other upcoming programs in the series.
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