Juliette Kayyem, the national security and foreign policy columnist for the Boston Globe and lecturer at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, told Salon that the impression of Al Jazeera as an anti-America, anti-Israel newsroom was misleading. On a visit last month to Doha’s Al Jazeera campus, she noted, the reporters seemed more than anything young, ambitious and innovative. (Failing to break into the U.S. market meaningfully with Al Jazeera English, the network had been streaming through YouTube for interested U.S. viewers.) They were unconcerned about ownership issuing marching orders: “The monarchy knows Al Jazeera is a good brand for the monarchy,” said Kayyem. “And the more they mess with Al Jazeera, it’s not a good brand.”

Which is not to say that Al Jazeera has magically shed a point of view. “I suspect as viewers get to know the content,” said Al Tompkins, the Poynter Institute’s senior faculty for broadcasting, “they will develop filters through which to watch the journalism, in the same way thoughtful viewers filter Fox or MSNBC and so on.” He cited Britain, Canada, South Africa and Denmark as states whose government-funded networks did good journalistic work.

But, the BBC aside, these states’ networks are not the subject of much discussion in the U.S. Part of why Al Jazeera has become such a valuable brand comes from its coverage of the Arab Spring, the event that moved breaking news in the Middle East away from bipolar conflicts and toward something a bit more complicated and a bit harder to slant. “What is the Arab Street anymore?” asked Kayyem. “At one stage there were revolutionaries and dictators, and Al Jazeera provided the forum for the Street. That’s harder to do with the conflicts that are ongoing now.” She noted that on-the-ground reporting on Egypt of late had presented many citizens’ shades of interpretation to Mohamed Morsi’s elevation to president. “It’s a more honest story to tell than how U.S. papers presented it, which is: Here’s another dictator.”

If the conflicts in the Middle East are too multivalent to treat with a simplistic slant, all the better for Al Jazeera’s value as a newsgathering outfit. “Most people in this country don’t pay that much money to international news,” said Brent Cunningham, deputy editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. “If this is available and there’s people who come across it and it makes them think or question or challenge their assumptions, that’s all to the good.”