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According to Al Jazeera English's U.N. and New York correspondent, Mark Seddon, who has reported for BBC from Iraq, North Korea and China and forSky News from Yemen, and its regional news editor for the Americas, Kieran Baker, a former CNN editor and producer, the plucky news station has attracted veteran journalists from around the world. British journalist David Frost, formerly with BBC; former CNN producer James Wright; Riz Khan and Veronica Pedrosa, former anchors at CNN International; and Dave Marash, a former correspondent for ABC News' \"Nightline,\" are just a few of the 800 employees from 55 countries who have gathered to build this globally minded television news station.

BUT PERHAPS the most successful communications project - and certainly the best known - is none other than al-Jazeera television. It was born in 1996 by decree of the emir, and is run by a board of directors. Yet, it has been granted de facto independence to achieve the formidable goal of wresting control of Arab news from Western media, which many Arabs feel to be short on objectivity and long on political manipulation. In an interview, Jihad Ali Ballout, head of communications and media relations for al-Jazeera, told me that the station's mission statement is to redress the balance of reporting between Arab and non-Arab sources. Previously, information about the Arab world was gathered by foreign news agencies such as the BBC, CNN, and Radio Monte Carlo, before being packaged as news and broadcast internationally as unchallenged truth. At that time, Arabs had little choice but to rely on Western electronic media for information about their region or else to turn to unreliable state-controlled sources, which ignored or distorted opposition voices and often were simply vehicles for political and religious dogma. Al-Jazeera has been fighting vigorously to change this media landscape, and its efforts have been controversial - so much so that the station itself is frequently at the centre of the news story. In contrast, some Arabs saw in this display a small victory for their people in a brutal conflict initiated and orchestrated by the Americans and British to decimate an Arab nation - even though these same Arab viewers might not have approved of Saddam Hussein's despotic rule in Iraq. Mr Ballout defends al-Jazeera's decision to broadcast the clip by pointing out a difference in sensibilities between Arabs and non-Arabs. He asserts that Arabs tend to have a different sense of what a dead body represents; they believe that life on earth is temporary, that physical death is not the end of our lives. Therefore, blood and corpses do not elicit the same responses from Arabs as from non-Arabs. As for al-Jazeera's reporters, Mr Ballout finds it curious that both they and their news service have been accused by some Arabs of being pro-American or pro-European while Americans and Europeans attack them for being \"pro-Arab.\" To illustrate, he points out that al-Jazeera is banned in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Syria, while at the same time Americans and Europeans claim it has acted as a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden, whose tapes were first broadcast exclusively on the channel. Mr Ballout deflects this latter criticism by reiterating the station's mission statement, which he says is predicated on the same principles of journalism that other media try to follow: newsworthiness, relevancy, and authenticity. He also repeated his argument that al-Jazeera does not editorialize its coverage of news events, saying that while certain programs are oriented toward discussion, debate, and editorial presentation, its news broadcasts try to report the news untainted by political ideals.