Al-Jazeera has changed everything

"So much has changed in this Arab world since the last Gulf War," Fergal Keane writes in the Independent. "The arrival of satellite television stations such as Al-Jazeera has transformed the information landscape: the agenda is no longer dominated by Western news outlets or by the craven and awful state-controlled media. Hour by hour, Arab families follow the progress of this war, and it is being mediated for them by Arab reporters. The information war is being lost in the Arab world, partly because the old sources of information no longer hold sway, and at least partly because nobody here wants to give the coalition the benefit of the doubt."

In a related piece for the Guardian, Faisal Bodi, a senior editor for aljazeera.net, argues that his network is "a threat to American media control -- and they know it."