Although Al-Jazeera America is due to launch on August 20, the network has done little to promote its arrival as an alternative to Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and HLN, Politico.com columnist Dylan Byers observed today (Monday). And while AJAM, as it is being called, has said that it plans to emphasize solid, non-ideological investigative reporting rather than the opinionated-flavored news that successful cable news operations have employed in recent years, it has yet to prove that the appetite for a straightforward newsgathering channel actually exists in the United States, Byers wrote. He quoted former Al Jazeera English anchor David Marash as saying that the channel can't expect to draw many viewers away from the existing cable news networks. Like Fox, they're going to have to try to create an audience -- an audience of younger people who are obviously less conservative than the Fox audience, Marash said. It's an audience that currently is trained to get their information on the Internet. He is not concerned about the lack of prelaunch promotion for the network. My guess is once they have a product on the air, they'll become more aggressive in terms of public relations and advertising, Marash said. But in some ways, that makes perfect sense: Why flog something that people can't see yet?