The American media will compete soon with English-speaking foreign news media broadcasts in the United States. Americans will get their first taste of non-western media when Al-Jazeera in English makes its debut in 2007.

Al-Jazeera is an Arabic media station founded in 1996 in Qatar. Al-Jazeera in English will broadcast information about the Middle East and the rest of the world to the United States in the same basic format as it does in its Arabic format.

“News is power. When you are no longer the source of news, you lose power,” said Orayb Najjar, NIU communication associate professor who specializes in Middle Eastern media.

Media in the United States is not the same as it is in other countries. In some countries, the state-run institutions are nothing but “propaganda machines,” said Allen May, general broadcast manager of the Northern Television Center.

In any media environment, news agencies run the risk of becoming state-run institutions. However, information and propaganda may be a simple matter of perspective.

One person’s spin or propaganda is another person’s information,” Najjar said. “The foreign media, especially Al-Jazeera, like the American media, does not always get it right, but it is not propagating deliberate misinformation.”

Despite political risks in allowing foreign media to be broadcast in the United States, the benefits can outweigh the risks.

“If we learn what other people hear and say, we will know what they think,” May said.

Additionally, the United States can have an additional news agency to ask questions other native stations might be unwilling or unable to ask, Najjar said. Al-Jazeera challenged American government’s reasons for going to war, even while giving American officials the chance to explain themselves in interviews.

“Even now, the U.S. media does not often broadcast the total number of the Iraqi dead, but Al-Jazeera does,” she said. “The U.S. government pressured CNN and other American networks not to broadcast Osama Bin Laden’s tapes; they complied, Al-Jazeera did not.”

There are additional considerations to deal with when introducing foreign media outlets into American society.

The more opportunities Americans have to understand how the world thinks and acts, the more understanding people will be, said Kay Forest, NIU associate professor of sociology.

“Americans tend to become insulated from the foreign world and we get a lopsided view,” Forest said.