Published: January 2, 2005《纽约时报杂志》

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, the general manager of Al Arabiya, a 24-hour satellite-news channel broadcasting from Dubai, has six plasma-screen TV's in his office on the floor of the channel's glowing, ultramodern newsroom set. They are always on. One is tuned to Al Arabiya itself, and depending on where the cameras are placed, Al-Rashed sometimes catches a glimpse of himself, pacing around his desk on his cellphone. Another shows Al Jazeera, the channel's main competition. A third is tuned to a new Saudi government satellite channel, and a fourth displays CNN. Al-Rashed likes to flip around on the other two -- from Al Hurra, the widely ignored news channel that the United States government started last February, to the BBC and then to Al Manar, the Hezbollah-owned station that was banned by the French and American governments last month for broadcasting anti-Semitic slanders and what a State Department spokesman called ''incitement to violence.''

Al-Rashed's job is to find a place for Al Arabiya within this array, preferably at the top of the ratings. For now, though, it is Al Jazeera, which was started in 1996 by the emir of the gulf state of Qatar, that sets the standard, and the tone, for Arab television news. According to a poll conducted last May by Zogby International and the University of Maryland, Al Jazeera is the first choice for 62 percent of satellite-news viewers in Jordan, 66 percent in Egypt and 44 percent in Saudi Arabia. In most countries in the poll, Al Arabiya came in a distant second, although the professor who designed the poll, Shibley Telhami, said it had captured a ''remarkable'' market share for a satellite channel that, at the time, had been on the air for only a year; 39 percent of satellite-news viewers said they watched Al Arabiya almost daily. And in Saudi Arabia, the biggest advertising market in the region, the ratings race is much closer.

Sheik Walid al-Ibrahim, a Saudi, is the owner of both Al Arabiya and its parent network, the Middle East Broadcasting Center, or MBC, the flagship station of which, a ''family entertainment'' channel called MBC 1, has more viewers than any other channel in the Middle East. Sheik Walid started Al Arabiya in February 2003 to provide a more moderate alternative to Al Jazeera. His goal, as he told me last month, was to position Al Arabiya as the CNN to Al Jazeera's Fox News, as a calm, cool, professional media outlet that would be known for objective reporting rather than for shouted opinions. He said he thought the market was ready for an alternative. ''After the events of Sept. 11, Afghanistan and Iraq, people want the truth,'' he said. ''They don't want their news from the Pentagon or from Al Jazeera.''

Sheik Walid's personal political interests may also be a motivating factor. He is the brother-in-law of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; the Saudi royal family dislikes Al Jazeera because it gives air time to Al Qaeda, and one of Al Qaeda's most cherished goals is the overthrow of the Saudi government. And before Al Jazeera, Saudi businessmen owned almost all of the major pan-Arab media, including MBC, the only channel that broadcast news bulletins to the whole of the Middle East, so the country and its rulers were rarely scrutinized by Arab journalists. Qatar's emir allowed Al Jazeera's reporters to take on the Saudis, as well as other governments in the Middle East.

Al Arabiya's sophisticated production values set it apart from other Arab news channels. Its sets and graphics have a clean, high-tech look, and its news bulletins are fast-paced -- no item lasts longer than two and a half minutes -- and are introduced with a dramatic drumbeat. While Al Jazeera anchors sit at a desk in front of a drab two-dimensional backdrop that looks a little like a local American news set from the 1970's, Al Arabiya's news is broadcast from the floor of its futuristic in-the-round silver-and-glass newsroom.

From its inception, Al Arabiya had a different style than Al Jazeera. There was nothing on Al Arabiya quite like Al Jazeera's signature programs, ''Islamic Law and Life,'' which offers advice to viewers on how to apply Sharia to their lives, and ''The Opposite Direction,'' which features fierce head-to-head debates. But what was reported and broadcast on Al Arabiya in its first months was, at times, similar to what you could see and hear on Al Jazeera. The two stations competed to show the most provocative, gory footage of casualties from Iraq. And after American troops captured Baghdad, Al Arabiya reported, incorrectly, that American forces had carried off all the treasures in the national museum.

American military authorities in Iraq and the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council certainly didn't seem to distinguish between the two satellite channels: they considered both to be allied with the enemy. In September 2003, the Governing Council suspended Al Arabiya from reporting on official government activities for two weeks because, the council maintained, the channel was supporting resistance attacks. And that November, the council ordered Al Arabiya to stop all of its Iraqi operations after the channel broadcast a taped message from Saddam Hussein in hiding. At a news conference that month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Al Arabiya ''violently anticoalition'' and in a separate interview said, ''There are so many things that are untrue that are being reported by irresponsible journalists and irresponsible television stations, particularly like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, that are leaving the Iraqi people with a totally imbalanced picture of what is happening in their country.''

When Sheik Walid heard in early 2004 that Al-Rashed had just stepped down as editor of Asharq Al Awsat, a prominent Arab-language daily published in London, he began trying to persuade him to come to Dubai. Al-Rashed, an American-educated Saudi, is well known for his often angry and outspoken columns criticizing Islamic fundamentalism, and especially for a particularly scathing column that he wrote after Chechen rebels seized a school in North Ossetia in September, a siege that ended in more than 300 deaths. ''It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims,'' he wrote. ''What a pathetic record. . . . We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.''

Beyond Al-Rashed's criticism of Islamic fundamentalists, the main target of his wrath is the Arab media. He didn't want to speak on the record about Al Jazeera, but during the three weeks I recently spent with the station's management and staff, he made it clear that he thinks his competition is not just misguided but actively dangerous. ''The region is being filled with inaccuracies and partial truths,'' he told me. (Like everyone I met at the station, he spoke English with me and Arabic with his co-workers.) ''I think people will always make good judgments if they have the right information and the whole information. What we lack right now is the truth and information. After that, we'll have a sane society. Right now it is an insane society because of the way information is being delivered to individuals.''

When Al-Rashed arrived at Al Arabiya, he replaced the news director and hired a new executive editor. The three men share a vision for the station that involves less gore and a wider definition of what is news and what should captivate the interest and emotions of their viewers. The new leadership triumvirate is interested in reporting stories about honor killings and violence against women in Arab countries, a widespread phenomenon rarely considered newsworthy by other Arab media outlets. Al-Rashed and his top editors also push for lighter stories about daily life -- the kind of apolitical features that fill much of the programming day on Western news channels