I’m watching the new Al Jazeera English channel but it’s not easy. Go here and keep refreshing the 15-minute free sample.
It’s foolish that they try to charge a monthly fee for watching the stream and even more foolish that they based the business on getting cable carriage. If they’d just put the channel up online, they’d be getting a huge audience today.
The channel is quite slick and certainly comes from a different perspective. And, oh, they’re trying so hard to go against stereotype — in the first few minutes I watched, I saw some travel piece going through a Jewish neighborhood in Israel/Palestine, I think, and a promotion flashing images of Katz’s Deli in New York. I’ll have to watch a lot more to parse the political and cultural references and news coverage. But they’re not making that easy.
