This country's youngest cable and satellite news channel is foreign-owned and has a name that sounds tricky, but isn't. It's Al Jazeera America – pronounced ahhl juh-ZEER-ahh. It's an English language network owned by the government of Qatar, a small Arab country on the Persian Gulf. The network, based in New York City, began last week with 14 hours of live news daily – including "America Tonight," an evening news show.

Al Jazeera America has about 900 employees , bureaus in 12 U.S. cities and a frequently updated website (america.aljazeera.com). Managers, producers and reporters are Americans with newspaper and broadcast backgrounds. Programs will include documentaries, investigative reports, a business show already airing, a sports program and a morning show. It already reflects "one of the most significant investments in television journalism in modern times," a New York Times media reporter writes, calling it "the most ambitious American television news venture since . . . the Fox News Channel [began] in 1996."

"It is an American channel for the American audience," says the top executive, Ehab Al Shihabi. “Viewers will see a news channel unlike the others . . . [with] fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news. There will be less opinion, less yelling and fewer celebrity sightings." And thanks to support from its oil-rich government owner, there are far fewer commercials than usual -- about six minutes an hour, compared with more than 15 minutes an hour on other news channels.

Network executive says: "We cover the areas that are not being covered. We cover areas that under-covered. We consider ourselves to be the voice for the voiceless." -- Ehab Al Shihabi, interim chief executive of Al Jazeera America

Critic says: "They have every right to be on. They have every right to be heard. . . . But Al Jazeera has two faces . . . [and] is, quite frankly, the voice of the enemy." – Glenn Beck, national radio talk show host

Professor says: "They're counting on there being an audience for kind of old-fashioned journalism, hard-edged journalism. I expect they will do a lot of investigative work and stay away from the Lindsay Lohan escapades and things like that." – Phil Seib, University of Southern California journalism professor