Salon's blurb: The "Fox News of the Arab world" plans to take on Rupert Murdoch and friends with a new English-language service -- unless the Bush administration succeeds in squashing it.

An excerpt:

It is fitting, somehow, that Al-Jazeera, the satellite channel most Americans believe speaks for the most militant part of the Arab world, and that the Bush administration has been gunning for ever since 9/11, owes its success to a French porn movie. Back in 1997, a year after the channel's launch, would-be viewers in the Middle East required an expensive, 6-foot dish to pick up Al-Jazeera's signal. To reach more viewers, Al-Jazeera needed a change of frequency, but for that, it required a slot on a Saudi-controlled satellite, which happened to be occupied by the French network Canal France International.

It would take a miracle, or an enormous sum, for Al-Jazeera to land the necessary space. Then, one summer day, a CFI technician flipped the wrong switch -- or so the story goes -- and pumped 30 minutes of "Club Privé au Portugal" into millions of Arab homes. The House of Saud, apparently more fearful of hardcore porn than news and current affairs, booted CFI from the "Arabsat" and signed a deal with Al-Jazeera, greatly expanding its audience and its fortunes.

Since then, Al-Jazeera -- based in Qatar, a country with a population smaller than some Manhattan neighborhoods -- has become the media powerhouse of the Arab world, a scrappy independent-minded news outlet in a region where media has long served the Arab ruling elite, not questioned them. It has made powerful enemies in every Middle Eastern government (excepting, as critics point out, Qatar), as shown this week when its Tehran, Iran, bureau was closed for reporting on -- or, as Iran's theocrats charge, inciting -- ethnic riots near the Iraqi border. The network's approach to the news has not made it a lot of friends in the halls of the American government, either. Despite this, or because of it, Al-Jazeera now claims tens of millions of viewers.

And if all goes according to plan, the channel's massive audience will soon expand beyond the Arabian peninsula (its name means, literally, "the Peninsula"). By the end of 2005, Al-Jazeera plans to launch a new international English-language service, to be called Al-Jazeera International. Westerners may still debate whether Al-Jazeera provides forward-thinking programming or jihadist propaganda, but soon more of them will be able to judge the controversial channel's brand of programming for themselves.