This is an NYT Magazine piece about how Al Arabiya is trying to position itself as the cool, objective alternative to the tabloid heat of Al Jazeera.

The three men trying to refocus the channel, broadcast out of Dubai, are general manager Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, executive editor Nabil Khatib and the proprietor -- Sheik Walid al-Ibrahim, who just happens to be brother-in-law of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd.

I liked this excerpt:

Khatib and Al-Rashed share many of the same views about journalism. They are both idealistic about the transformative social power of objective journalism, and both want to push Al Arabiya toward a less emotional, more measured view of the Middle East. But they came to these ideas from experiences that were almost completely opposite.

Al-Rashed's political perspective evolved at a distance from the Arab world, in the United States and England, where he seems to have found life more pleasant, rational and interesting than it is in Saudi Arabia. Khatib's life and career, by contrast, have been bound up in the claustrophobic conflict he was born into. Khatib is the youngest of seven children raised by a widowed mother in Nablus, in the West Bank. He said he first got the idea to be a journalist at age 15, in 1978, after he spent three months being interrogated in an Israeli jail before being released without charges. He was frequently beaten, he told me, and during one such beating, by an Israeli officer who called himself Captain Uzi, Khatib was told he had been arrested for incitement. Khatib didn't know what the word meant. After his release, he asked his oldest brother. ''Incitement,'' his brother told him, ''is journalism.''

However, much of their staff disagree with them, and they're losing cred on the Arab street for looking a little too pro-Am.

It's an interesting read -- one first touted on CAJ-L by Tom Popyk.