The Paradigm-breaker
The Paradigm-breaker Barbara Serra | Senior Presenter, Al Jazeera English
In 2006, the world was a very different place. George W. Bush was in the White House. Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death and violence in Iraq was peaking years after the supposed ‘mission accomplished’. The global financial crisis was brewing undetected. Facebook had just opened up to anyone with an email address. Twitter was in its infancy. It was also the year that Al Jazeera English was born, and I had the honour of being one of the London-based launch presenters. For all the excitement and pride, I remember how at the time Al Jazeera was viewed with suspicion by many Europeans, suspicion that sometimes bordered on hostility. As a Christian European, people would ask me why I’d chosen to work for a network that wasn’t European, that wasn’t Western. This question never came from fellow media professionals who understood the journalistic legacy that came with the name Al Jazeera. But as a face of the channel, you can’t live in the media bubble. You can, and will, be confronted anywhere by any member of the public. So you better have an answer because in our business perceptions matter. This may be uncomfortable to read, and it makes me a little resentful to write it. But it’s recalling how things used to be that makes the present so remarkable.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened. I can’t isolate the moment when in Europe AJE went from being the outsider, the paradigm-breaker, to being a member of the established (dare I say mainstream?) media. The so-called Arab Spring obviously played a part. But there’s another reason. As I’ve been told for more than a decade: “You go where other channels don’t go. You tell the stories other channels don’t tell. And you put local people at the centre of those stories.” True global diversity is at the heart of what we do, and that’s how we turned scepticism into trust. Al Jazeera broke the ‘International TV News’ mould by bringing a reality to our screens that wasn’t Western-centric. But in truth it broke another mould, perhaps unknowingly. Because so-called ‘international’ TV News was never just Western- centric. It was, and often remains, US- and UK- centric. English is the non-negotiable language of the global community but a language never exists in a vacuum. It is a conduit for the cultures from which it originates, so it follows that those cultures will have a disproportionate influence on the narrative. And that has been AJE’s great talent: The ability to use English as a truly international language to break through information barriers and borders.
So that’s my answer to those who ask why I work for a ‘non-Western’ news channel. I point to the island of Sicily on a map. “That’s where my roots are. Why should I have more affinity with Washington than with fellow Mediterranean countries?” I know, of course, that it’s not as simple as that. But those who insist on dividing the world into sections should realise that many of the cultural borders are blurred. One of the stories I’ll forever be grateful to Al Jazeera for letting me tell is my AJ Correspondent film ‘Fascism in the Family’. In it I explore my own family’s historical links to the Mussolini regime to see if fascism is indeed on the rise again, in Italy and elsewhere. A ‘Western’ story you might say, but it was fascinating to see how different the responses to the film were across our audience.
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