US embassy cable - 05DOHA1786

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 DOHA 001786 
 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR NEA/PD, NEA/ARP 
INFO NSC FOR ABRAMS, DOD/OSD FOR SCHENKER AND MATHENY 
LONDON FOR ARAB MEDIA OFFICE 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/25/2010 
TAGS: PREL, KPAO, QA, ALJAZEERA 
SUBJECT: MEETING WITH AL JAZEERA QUALITY ASSURANCE CHIEF 
 
REF: DOHA 1593 
 
Classified By: Ambassador Chase Untermeyer, Reasons 1.4 (b&d) 
 
1. (C) Summary: PAO met 10/26 with Jaafar Abbas Ahmed, the 
head of Al Jazeera's Quality Assurance unit. Abbas spoke 
frankly of the difficulties the unit faces in encouraging the 
professionalization of Al Jazeera, including resistance and 
hostility from AJ's older generation of journalists. He said 
progress has been made, however, and described AJ Managing 
Director Wadah Khanfar as "a source of strength." End summary. 
 
2. (C) Jaafar Abbas Ahmed, the head of Al Jazeera's Quality 
Assurance (QA) unit, is a Sudanese national with long 
experience as a journalist, including work as a BBC reporter. 
He told PAO he was blacklisted by Sudan for 15 years as a 
result of a report on Sudan for the BBC. He began working 
part-time with Al Jazeera at its inception in 1996 and set up 
the channel's QA unit in August 2004. He now works full time 
as the head of the QA unit, which is located in a villa in 
Doha's West Bay area, across town from the AJ TV studios. 
Abbas said the separation is intended to underline and 
safeguard the unit's independence. Abbas also writes 
newspaper columns for publications in Saudi Arabia, London, 
Sudan and Qatar. He said his column was recently banned in 
Sudan for six months but was reinstated a couple of weeks 
ago. 
 
3. (C) According to Abbas, the effort to professionalize Al 
Jazeera is an uphill one and that although progress has been 
made, "we still have a long way to go." The seven-member QA 
staff monitor the AJ TV channel 24 hours a day, with focus on 
news broadcasts and talk shows. Overview of the AJ website is 
also in their purview but is not carried out systematically 
due to limited staff resources. ("Sometimes we do a random 
inspection of the website, and we find all the rules have 
been completely ignored," he observed ruefully.) 
 
5. (C) Abbas said the first step undertaken by the QA unit 
after its founding in late 2004 was the promulgation of the 
Al Jazeera codes of conduct and ethics. Workshops were held 
for the Al Jazeera staff to introduce and explain the new 
codes; since then, the QA unit has been monitoring the 
channel's performance in light of these codes. Abbas attends 
the weekly editorial meetings and gives his input to senior 
editors and producers "bluntly, to their faces," he said. The 
QA unit also issues daily reports by email on the day's 
programming, and when a big event happens, the QA unit will 
record BBC and CNN coverage of the same event and compare it 
critically to AJ's coverage. 
 
6. (C) He noted that his unit met with significant resistance 
initially and were known informally among AJ staff as the 
KGB, the CIA, the FBI or ("the best one", said Abbas, 
laughing) the Expediency Discernment Council of the System 
(Note: The Iranian government watchdog committee headed by 
former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani. End note.) 
"Things have improved now," he said. "People are becoming 
wary of our criticism. We have producers, senior producers, 
coming over here to discuss our reports with us. We are like 
a tumor -- a benign one -- that people are learning to live 
with," he said, grinning. However, hostility still remains, 
he said, and there are some AJ journalists who even now will 
not return a casual greeting in the corridors. 
 
7. (C) The chief obstacle in professionalizing the channel is 
that "old habits die hard," said Abbas. He estimated that the 
AJ staff under his purview (all those who bear the title 
"journalist", which include correspondents, reporters, 
stringers, editors and producers) number not more than 200. 
While AJ started out with a significant number of ex-BBC 
reporters, this cadre has shrunk over the years, attracted to 
other channels such as Al Arabiyya, Abbas said. He added that 
only a handful remains. A majority of the remaining 
journalism staff are therefore ex-state TV reporters. They 
may be brilliant, but the journalistic culture they have 
absorbed is different from the one AJ is trying to cultivate, 
Abbas explained. There is, for example, a cultural tendency 
towards verbosity among Arabs, among whom rhetoric is a 
cherished and respected art. This tendency clashes with 
standard journalistic practice, which encourages reporters to 
avoid adjectives: If a particular event is "horrific", don't 
say so but let pictures and statistics show that to your 
audience, he said. 
 
8. (C) Abbas said that in his view there has been a definite 
improvement in Al Jazeera's overall performance since the 
QA's inception fourteen months ago. He said the newer, 
younger reporters with less experience respond very well to 
the AJ environment. The problem is with the older, more 
experienced journalists. The QA unit has had more of an 
impact on AJ's news broadcasts than it has had on the AJ talk 
shows, which are the domain of AJ's more experienced 
journalists. "Each of them thinks they are Oprah Winfrey. 
They think they don't need guidance," he said, rolling his 
eyes. 
 
9. (C) "We at Al Jazeera need to develop our own style," he 
said, pointing at a thick printout of the BBC's new style 
guide lying on his desk. "There is an overlap between code of 
conduct and style." For example, scenes of violence. How 
should AJ air them? Close up? Or only using long shots? "What 
seems gross in the US might not seem gross to an Arab viewer, 
he said. "And we are an Arab channel, we focus on what is of 
interest to the Arab viewer. The Arab viewer wants to see on 
screen proof of Israeli brutality, so it is OK to show a dead 
Palestinian child, for example," he said. "If you don't show 
these things, then they think you are participating in the 
cover-up." 
 
10. (C) Abbas also talked about the controversy over the use 
of the word "martyr" and the verbs associated with it. 
Current AJ guidance says the word may only be used in 
association with events in Palestine and nowhere else, he 
said. He described how AJ sent an admonitory fax two days ago 
to the AJ bureau chief in Beirut who interspersed his report 
on the release of the Mehlis report with mentions of the 
"martyr" Rafik Al Hariri. Many in Al Jazeera think it is a 
mistake to allow the use of the word at all, even in 
connection with Palestinians, but that is an emotionally 
charged topic in the Arab world and one it is too late to 
walk back, said Abbas. 
 
11. (C) He said the QA unit is developing a computer system 
that will allow them to access with one click the record of 
every AJ journalist: How many times he has made biased 
remarks; what are his repeated mistakes; how many times he 
breached the code of conduct or ethics; and so on. "Then we 
will have a say in the performance appraisal of the 
employees, which affects allowances, annual increases, even 
promotions," Abbas said. 
 
12. (C) The difficulties faced by the QA unit are many, but 
it has come to rely on AJ Managing Director Wadah Khanfar as 
"a source of strength," said Abbas. "He is behind us all the 
way." 
UNTERMEYER