With the purchase of Current TV this week, Pan-Arab news network Al Jazeera bought a huge base of American subscribers (many of whom didn't seem to know they even had the channel). According to some TV industry experts, however, Al Jazeera's real struggle in the U.S. market will be overcoming any association with the al-Qaeda and its long-dead leader Osama Bin Laden.

Although the "Arab CNN" was praised by Hillary Clinton last year for providing more useful coverage of the Middle East than our own opinion-driven commercial news outlets, much of America remembers the channel as the one that aired Bin Laden's propaganda videos in the wake of September 11th. At the time, Al Jazeera's Washington DC bureau chief compared the release of those videos as a newsworthy not unlike when the Unabomber's messages were released in the New York Times.

“Most Americans associate Al Jazeera with Al Qaeda,” Robert Thompson of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University told the New York Daily News. “It’s only a relatively small percentage of our population that see it as the award-winning, old-school journalism institution that it is.” In other words, this is the cable news equivalent of that time everyone kept insisting on emphasizing the "Hussein" in Barack Hussein Obama.

But it's not just middle America, the channel will have to win over: Just after the Current TV buyout announcement, Gawker noted a slew of off-color jokes making the rounds on Twitter.

Regardless of America's preconceived notions of the Arab news giant, Current TV is available in about 40 million homes, but only about 42,000 viewers tuned in on a typical evening in 2012. So, it seems Al Jazeera America's biggest hurdle might just be showing viewers where to find it in their overcrowded cable guides.

As for the channel's local presence in San Francisco, the network says it will "most definitely" maintain a bureau in the city, but not necessarily in Current TV's existing headquarters on King Street — right across the street from a good ol' American ballpark.

In related news, shortly after the purchase announcement, California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom immediately announced he was departing The Gavin Newsom Show.

[NYDailyNews]
[SFEx]