Al Jazeera On Panay Avenue

The closer you get to the front-lines, the closer you are to Al Jazeera. This is the line that comes into my head while interviewing broadcast journalist Marga Ortigas, one of a two-person Al Jazeera bureau team in the Philippines (the other being British cameraman Brendan Ager), with offices at the ABS-CBN compound along Panay Avenue, Quezon City. It’s been awhile since we had seen Marga on TV, and now here she is in person ambling into Starbucks in the compound shortly before 1 p.m., taking a break from hectic preparations for the ASEAN non-summit in Cebu.

"We are also preparing for the Subic rape case decision, which has been moved to December 4," she says on the 24th of November, the day that Max Soliven dies and Manny Pacquiao comes home to a rousing welcome, and a little more than a week after the launch of the Al Jazeera English cable channel on 15 November, exactly 10 years to the date the mother station Al Jazeera Arabic began worldwide Pan-Arabic operations.

"The cable channel is coming soon, first to Destiny then later to Skycable," Marga informs us, sometime in December selected cable TV subscribers will likely be getting Al Jazeera signals in their living rooms.

It’s a misconception, Marga says, that Al Jazeera broadcasts only news about terrorists and the radical chic. "It’s what the U.S. sees. For example, if we had, say, around 500 hours of Bin Laden, we actually had 5,000 hours of news about Bush," she says.

For the ASEAN summit, they won’t be just focusing on the cool rhetoric of the leaders and the plain black and white agenda usually reported by the traditional wires and cable channels, but delve into the deeper issues, the implications behind the story that could affect the smallest man on the street.

"We report news that is not the usual news in the Western sense, or what would ordinarily qualify as news in New York," she says, adding that Al Jazeera has, for example, extensive coverage of Africa and other places usually passed up by the regular media which deem the story perhaps too insignificant or a mere waste of time.

Where has Marga been all this time?

"I’ve been with Al Jazeera for a year now helping set up the Philippine bureau, but the main Asian hub is in KL (Kuala Lumpur) where Veronica Pedrosa is," she says, referring to her former colleague in CNN.

Marga says Al Jazeera’s work force is composed of personnel coming from the different mainstream media, from CNN to BBC to the ultra-right Fox News, which makes it quite a jump to the perceived other end of the spectrum.

She herself was recruited in London, after finishing five and a half years with CNN. She has been to Baghdad, Gaza and Jolo.

"It’s a pity because Jolo is such a beautiful place. And yet walking around there I felt as if I were in Baghdad, where people can be shot and killed anytime on the street and the reason would never be clear, whether it was for political or personal reasons," she says of the notably high level of paranoia in such places.

There’s also the danger of allergenics as Marga broke into rashes after eating the native Sulu delicacy curacha.

In Baghdad she was there off and on for more than a year, from after the fall of Baghdad and the much quoted information minister was proven wrong about the "infidels dying at the gates," until just a day before Saddam Hussein was captured in a foxhole in the outskirts of the city.

In Gaza her trip there was a last-minute wonder, as she had just wrapped up coverage in Baghdad and was in Amman on her way back to base in London, when just before boarding she got a call from her boss to do a volte-face from the airport and head via land trip to Gaza. Her camerawoman who was to proceed there from Amman was waiting for her at the hotel and lost no time ribbing her.

"The people there are so warm," she says of the Gaza residents, even the eyeless wouldn’t think they were in the crosshairs.

She also debunks the theory that most footage taken of bound and gagged hostages about to be executed were courtesy of Al Jazeera.

Before CNN she was with Channel 7 and the Probe team of Che-Che Lazaro, where she honed her investigative reporting chops. At the ABS-CBN compound, the broadcast giant with which Al Jazeera English is an affiliate, she is reunited with former CNN colleague Maria Ressa, who holds office in the newsroom on the ground floor.

The day before the interview, they were at the Department of Foreign Affairs office in Pasay for a pre-ASEAN summit briefing. Marga’s team will be leaving for Cebu just after the Subic rape case decision.

Then just the other day she paid a courtesy call on the Qatari ambassador, and what a pleasant surprise it was when they learned that they both speak Spanish.

Well, it’s all been rush rush and tienes tienes the past days, and now we suddenly find ourselves on the second floor digs of Al Jazeera in the maze-like ABS-CBN building, where the program goes on 24/7 on a monitor, sometimes the words not exactly fitting the visuals, video and audio separated by a split second due to satellite transmission adjustments.

They are still in the process of fine-tuning, Marga says, but the picture-driven, documentary-like news stories would be state-of-the-art by the time they broadcast over Destiny, most likely beside the cluster of news channels in the 40s–stay tuned for further announcements.

Al Jazeera has landed some familiar faces in its broadcast team of anchors, including Sir David Frost who has interviewed a number of presidents.

But life hasn’t changed much really for Marga, as contrary to popular belief she has not converted to Islam. She continues to look for fresh angles for stories, something that would be appreciated by the man in the street because, ultimately, the issues would concern him.

It’s exciting, she says, being with Al Jazeera, a cable news channel departing from the mainstream. Of course it helps too that the channel "is bankrolled by the Qatari emir’s vast wealth," to quote one of the conventional wire reports.

"Where’s Janjalani?" we ask her over the phone days before the interview.

"I don’t know. Where is Janjalani?" she replies. Another story they are following up is the deportation of Sovie, the wife of Dulmatin, one of the alleged Jemaah Islamiyah bombers responsible for the Bali bombings in 2002.

It should give us another way of looking at things, much like a salmon swimming upstream, bringing the news from south to north, the absolute reverse of the trickle down effect.

The closer you are to the front-lines and you can already smell the sweat and blood of the principals, then it must be Al Jazeera. And see Marga there chasing a story–no that’s not Atika Schubert–with cameraman in tow. From south to north and back again.