Al Jazeera's (Global) Mission

The hurdles to finding advertisers promise to be even higher. Another unscientific poll of top media-buying agencies--the ones responsible for buying commercial time for the Procter & Gambles and Chryslers of the world--produced still more howling silence. Most agencies we called (OMD, Starcom, MediaVest, MindShare, Carat) either refused to respond or politely declined to comment. One account executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, "Politically, this is a nightmare. Never in a billion years would I bring this to our client."

Marketing guru Ernest Lupinacci, formerly CEO of the hot ad shop Anomaly, spells out the hazard: "If you're a marketer, your worst nightmare is to wake up and read a headline on the Drudge Report: 'U.S.Widgets to Buy Airtime on Al Jazeera.' Next thing you know, you're a tape loop on Howard Stern."

Rushing, who has gone on a number of sales calls, says the problem with selling AJI isn't so much its dodgy parentage as the cable operators' cold eye to a P&L. "I go into distribution meetings ready for a fight," he says. "But they cut me short because they don't care. They say, 'Americans aren't interested in international news, and I'm not going to make a lot of money off it.' "

AJI claims to have research contradicting that assessment, particularly among its target market: news-hungry gen-Xers who are currently getting their information from the Internet. And if it really has found a way to get young Americans to turn off their iPods and start watching cable news, well, hats off to them. That would officially make them the smartest folks in the news biz.

Of course, AJI is well aware of its image problem in the U.S. market. "I'm thankful I don't have Lindsey's job," Rushing admits. And it's certainly nice at times like these to have your own emir (he's floating AJI's reported $85 million annual budget). But right now, the mantra around AJI is that their job is to produce quality journalism, not worry about snagging the Tide account. Oliver concedes she'd like to sell advertising in the United States in the future but knows it won't come easy. To hedge its bets, AJI, like most networks, is developing other properties--a sports channel, a children's channel, an Arabic version of C-Span--to help keep the news division afloat.

But the truth is, while AJI would be delighted to run ads from U.S.-based companies, it can actually do just fine without our commercial support. Oliver estimates her potential market as the "1 billion English speakers around the world," including some of the fastest-growing economies on the planet, many of which are not particularly enamored of U.S. policy. The channel has already struck a distribution deal with Sky, Rupert Murdoch's global satellite-TV outfit, which AJI is counting on for an immediate 8 million viewers. As Oliver delicately points out, "The U.S., while very important, is only one country." And AJI's market is the world, where money from Lenovo, Sony, Nokia, and United Arab Emirates Airlines is just as good as greenbacks from Pepsi or Dell.

In fact, says Simon Anholt, a UK-based brand consultant and author of Brand America, the old Al Jazeera's latent brand equity translates into a tremendous opportunity for its English-language station to deliver a platform for certain kinds of brands. "Benetton, Diesel, Camper--any kind of global youth fashion brand that's desperate to be edgy and ironically non-Western would likely do well," he says.

From an American perspective, that prospect evokes the possibility of a larger, more disturbing transformation. AJI will, in essence, be running a superfunded media lab to test a revolutionary proposition: Can a channel that employs the language of global commerce--English--but consciously eschews its natural Anglo-American worldview, become a new transnational cultural and economic force? In other words, once each region of the world can step to the mike on an equal footing and tell its story through the lens of its own audience, the world will be that much flatter. Remote parts of China, Indonesia, and the Indian subcontinent, for example, will be able to get their world news--and their advertising and, presumably, their actual products--filtered not by London (via the BBC) and Atlanta (on CNN) but by a new, independent, global vision. No one's saying that's AJI's explicit objective. But its success--or failure--will make a powerful statement about the mood of the world and about America's place in it.

Prior to being hired, Rushing learned an embarrassing lesson in the blinding effects of cultural myopia. At a lunch with AJI managing director Nigel Parsons, he'd suggested that the channel consider changing its name before launching in the United States. Parsons just laughed: Because of the Al Jazeera name, "it will gain access that other media outlets won't have, not just in the Middle East but in other places in the world," he told the young Marine. "It's not all about America." As Rushing says now, that was "a perception-shattering moment."