Arabic television station Al Jazeera launches an English-speaking channel on Wednesday to report world news from a Middle East perspective and challenge the dominance of Western media.
The station, which has angered Washington and some Arab governments with its reporting from Iraq, said it wanted to give a fresh voice to under-reported regions round the world.
"We are trying to expand our audience beyond the Arabic-speaking world, and enter the English-speaking world," said Wadah Khanfar, director general of the Al Jazeera Group. "One of our goals is to reverse the flow of information to the south," he said, arguing that the Middle East and developing nations have until now not had a voice of their own.
In doing so the new channel mirrors projects in France, Russia and Africa that aim to give a regional perspective in English, the dominant global language, but offer little commercial reward to their owners.
"The model is the BBC's World Service," Steven Barnett, a professor of communications at the University of Westminster, said. "The Foreign Office didn't fund that out of generosity. It funded it because it was spreading the voice of Britain.
"It was not forcing propaganda down people's throats but it was still bringing to bear a perspective that was essentially British and spreading it around the world," he told Reuters. The channel's Arabic sister service shook the Arab and Western world when it launched in 1996.
After making its name in the Afghan war with exclusive footage of Osama bin Laden, the Qatar-based satellite channel drew fierce criticism for showing footage of dead US soldiers in Iraq and prisoners of war. "The existing broadcasters do not provide what Al Jazeera is about to provide," said Sue Phillips, London Bureau chief.
"We want to push the boundaries, we want to cover parts of the world that are not covered by the other organisations, the unreported world, (and) ... we want to probe and ask those questions that perhaps others don't ask," she told Reuters.
The channel was to launch earlier this year but was delayed several times. Al Jazeera officials blamed technical problems, denying US media reports that right wing groups were pressing cable networks not to carry the channel in the United States.
Moscow set up the state-funded "Russia Today" channel in 2005 to show news from a Russian perspective and a French 24-hour news channel is due to launch at the end of this year to offset the "unified, Anglo-Saxon" outlook.
A pan-African 24-hour news network, "A24", run by Africans for Africans to challenge the Western-dominated coverage of the continent is also in the planning stage with a view to launch by the end of 2007.
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