March 30, 2003	Sunday	Muharram 26, 1424

CAIRO: When star reporter Taysr Aluni suddenly gets his head down as another missile hits Baghdad, around 50 million Arabs also instinctively duck as they sit in front of their television sets.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera transmits coverage of the attacks on the Iraqi capital in real time and in great detail. The broadcaster has become the news medium of choice in the living rooms and cafes of the Arab world, edging out its competitors.

Anchorman Aluni has enjoyed the status of a hero since the days when he was for a time the sole foreign correspondent in Kabul. While the broadcaster, the only independent television station in the Arab world, has become a trusted source of news for many of its clients, there has been savage criticism from the US and Britain.

There Al Jazeera is sometimes lumped together with the Iraqi state television as part of the propaganda machine of the Saddam regime. After Al Jazeera broadcast pictures last Sunday of dead and captured US servicemen, hackers began blocking access to both its English and Arabic Internet sites.

The self-styled Patriotic Freedom Militia in Cyberspace left a US flag flying on the Al Jazeera site and the greeting: God Bless our Troops. The broadcaster is widely known as the CNN of the Middle East, but over the week-long course of the war, Al Jazeera has been more interested in putting itself forward as the alternative to the US channel.

It has reporters on the ground in cities like Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. Its viewers see the war from the point of view of the Iraqi victims, watch dead and injured civilians and listen to the statements and angry tirades from leading Iraqi politicians.

These viewers, spread across the Arab world from Morocco to Oman, also hear what the politicians and military chiefs of the US and Britain have to say, although Al Jazeera has had just one exclusive interview with US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

By contrast, CNN no longer has reporters left in Baghdad. Its small team with correspondent Nic Robertson at its head was thrown out of the city on Friday a week ago as the war began.

CNN does, however, have a cooperation agreement with Al Jazeera and so continues to receive television footage. And its reporters are with US troops advancing on Baghdad.

The deep divide between the journalistic worlds of the two broadcasters is demonstrated by the disagreement over broadcasting footage showing killed and captured US soldiers.

When it comes to the tricks of the trade, the two channels show remarkably similar techniques to get their messages across.

During a press conference held by the Iraqi Interior and Information ministers, CNN split the screen and showed a US tank rolling through the desert, its gun trained on the two Iraqi ministers.

And when Al Jazeera showed US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld making a speech about the liberation of Iraq, he was given just a third of the screen, while the rest was taken up with footage of plumes of smoke rising all over Baghdad following an air raid.—dpa