One thing that media and Middle East watchers will want to keep an eye on in the coming days is the way that news outlets in the region, especially independent satellite giants such as al-Jazeera, cover the Wikileaks scandal. Wikileaks is being covered extensively in the West, often from a US-centric perspective, but it threatens to be a big story for several Arab regimes that are mentioned repeatedly in the leaked State Department cables as well. Given the potentially embarrassing nature of some of the stories, one might expect the state controlled “official” outlets to downplay or even ignore the Wikileaks stories that deal with their respective regimes. Similarly, what opposition press exists in a given state can be expected to praise the stories. But what will (relatively) independent outlets do? Al-Jazeera is the gold standard for Mideast media, but is less than a decade and a half old and has never confronted a story like this. Its detractors have long accused it of taking direction from Qatar, where it is based, and at the very least the network clearly directs the bulk of its coverage, so stinging toward nearly everyone else, away from the tiny Gulf state. Will this delicate balance be compromised, forcing Jazeera to either compromise its independent reputation or call out its hosts?

Without access to al-Jazeera’s newsroom, it is of course impossible to know for sure why the network chooses to cover what it does, but there is always tension in the news business between shaping public opinion and responding to it, and Jazeera is a particularly intriguing outlet. Whether it is being critical of Israel, the US, or America’s Arab allies, is al-Jazeera doing so because it is catering to an audience that is already angry, or reporting in an aggressive and often adversarial manner in an effort to lead public opinion? Wikileaks will introduce another set of data points to help observers analyze the station.

So far, I would suggest that al-Jazeera seems to be under-playing the Wikileaks story. It has reported modestly on the parts of Wikileaks that include Qatar, mentioning for example that State Department cables say Qatar’s security forces have been “reluctant to act against terrorists.”[1] But story number one on aljazeera.net at the moment is about the Iranian nuclear scientists who were attacked this morning,[2] and story two is about demonstrations in Upper Egypt in the wake of Parliamentary elections.[3] Would Wikileaks be merely the third (and fourth and fifth) most popular story if the “Arab Street” knew all the details? I would guess that it would be first, and it would indisputably be ahead of Egyptian elections.

The next few days should be fascinating. How al-Jazeera deals with Wikileaks involving Qatar, especially the ruling Royal Family, compared to leaks involving other Arab or Gulf states will be critical. And if Saudi funded, rival satellite station al-Arabiya goes after any Wikileaks story, Qatar-related or not, watch al-Jazeera’s response: it will hopefully prove enlightening.