Street Map Of Doha

Text by Nancy Cook | Photograph by Franco Pagetti

Friday is typically a quiet day of prayer in the Muslim world. Wadah Khanfar, the director general of Al Jazeera, did not expect to spend the evening of February 11th sitting with two colleagues in his office in Doha, Qatar, watching Egypt's Vice President Omar Suleiman announce that President Hosni Mubarak was stepping down. "It was the shortest and most important speech in Arab history," Khanfar says.

Khanfar had been dueling with the Mubarak regime for 18 days. The government jammed Al Jazeera's satellite signal, so that most of its audience could not watch its coverage. Thugs ransacked its Cairo office. Ayman Mohyeldin, the star reporter for Al Jazeera English, had to hide a camera on the balcony of a random guy's apartment to broadcast live shots of Cairo's Tahrir Square. Police repeatedly threatened the network's reporters, who stopped showing their faces on air.

Now Mubarak, like Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, was gone. Khanfar couldn't believe it. "These dictators were just a matter of fact -- like nature, like air," he says several weeks later, as we talk in that same office where he first heard the news. "They just existed."

He recalls how he made the three-minute walk from his office to the Arabic-language newsroom, filled with employees, some of them Egyptian. He instructed the editors and producers to keep the camera on Tahrir Square and not move it. Put the audio on, he told them, but don't let any commentators or news anchors speak. For 10 minutes, Al Jazeera showed the jubilant scene: millions of protesters whooping, clapping, jumping, and waving Egyptian flags, with not one journalist straining for a career-defining turn of phrase. Imagine Anderson Cooper trying to keep quiet in the middle of a revolution. "It was the most beautiful TV I have ever seen," Khanfar says. "It was just public-made TV without any interference."

Al Jazeera's sudden ascent has been big news in the United States this year. The New York Times has written about the network and its role in the revolutionary events in the Arab world roughly a dozen times since the beginning of 2011. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commended its seriousness during her March testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States," she said. "You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock." Absent from almost every major cable system in the U.S., the network has found an audience here online, deftly leveraging Twitter to drive traffic to the Al Jazeera English website. It has become the third-most-popular news outlet on YouTube.