The other panelists, all media professionals, didn't always agree with what he said, but that's OK. Journalists are an argumentative bunch and the al Jazeera man has a right to his opinions.

Al Jazeera was back again the day the Security Council voted to relax sanctions against Saddam Hussein. With no studio space of its own, the reporter got to broadcast his piece from the chair that Kofi Annan's press secretary generally occupies in the second-floor briefing room, with the UN insignia as backdrop. Pretty spiffy.

Does anyone have a problem with that? If so, it may come in the category of shooting the messenger, a tendency that has been protested in this space before. If al Jazeera wants to pay the UN good money for broadcast facilities -- presumably the Organization wasn't doing it for free -- and to disseminate a legitimate UN news story to the Arab street, why would anyone complain?

Folks fluent in Arabic will have a better handle on Al Jazeera's product than the rest of us. It may or may not be true that some of the writing is pure vitriol. The columnist Arianna Huffington reported recently that in the al Jazeera lexicon, suicide bombers are martyrs, Israelis devils, Jewish people descended from apes and pigs and the Holocaust a pure figment of someone's fertile imagination.

Also, she advised her readers, OBL is to al Jazeera a heroic figure and 9/11 was really a big Zionist plot. Is this account of its alleged shortcomings true? Perhaps. Perhaps not. As they say, don't believe everything you read in the papers.

The outlet, said to be hugely popular in the Arab world -- and never more so than when it was running video loops depicting Palestinian casualties in the recent bloody conflict with Israel -- maintains an English language Web site that looked fairly straightforward during a recent visit. There were several color pictures of OBL and one of Colin Powell. It's not a busy site, judging from the fact that a visitor that day was only the 158,326th person to log on since August of 1996.

Al Jazeera has been called the Arabic CNN. Still, not every Arab is crazy about it. Bahrain which recently held elections -- the first in that Persian Gulf state in which women were able to run for office and vote -- decided that al Jazeera was not welcome to cover the event. Nabil al-Ham, the state's information minister, complained that the broadcaster, based in nearby Qatar, "deliberately seeks to harm Bahrain."

This may come as a surprise to many in the US, but Ham accused al Jazeera of bias in Israel's favor and voiced his belief that the company had been "penetrated by Zionists."

Back in March, al Jazeera did have an interview set up with Ariel Sharon. It was canceled, according to one explanation, because of pressure from the Palestinian Authority. The broadcaster's own version of the affair was that the Israeli prime minister's office set last-minute conditions and the interview was then called off because of that, although against its own wishes.