This brief, valuable look at Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyya serves as an excellent introduction to an enormous subject: the significance and impact of Arab media today, and its interaction with the ideas and ideologies of the West. Fortunately, the Stanley Foundation delivers -- this is just a taste of what they've produced on the subject. I'd like to quote from this segment, because it's the content here that matters. (There's nothing special about the presentation.)

Here's the 'American' pov: "Al Jazeera is a propaganda outlet, as well as a news agency, and it's one that promotes ideas that are very inimical to American interests," says Ilan Berman, the VP for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council in D.C. "[Al Quaeda] is inherently more ideologically proximate to Al Quaeda and to other regional radicals..."

What does Al Jazeera say to this? According to news editor Ahmed Sheikh: "When we receive a tape by bin Laden, we choose certain quotes that we believe are newsworthy, and we put it on the air, and we drop out all the other things that we believe are just propaganda, so we are not a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden -- and for god's sake, we did not divide the world into two camps, and it is not Al Jazeera who installed Osama bin Laden as the head of the 'camp of evil.'