Cuba may not be famous for consumer choice but even there hotel guests can now flick through a bewildering array of television channels in their room. On a recent trip to Havana I found not just established channels such as CNN and Deutsche Welle, but newer contenders such as CCTV-9 (from China) and Telesur (funded by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela).

Ordinary Cubans, of course, are not (yet) exposed to such an unexpected array of choice. But in most parts of the world, consumers can now see different versions of what constitutes "news", due to the rapid and recent growth in 24-hour news stations. On CNN last week, for example, there was wall-to-wall coverage of the Democratic convention in Denver. On Telesur the ever-present smiling face was that of Mr Chávez, not Barack Obama.

It was a reminder, if one was needed, that to broadcast news is to choose, and to choose severely, from a host of possible events and ways of framing them. And we now have a widening array of examples among the different channels as to what constitute important events, trends and, above all, personalities.

Much of the boom in television news stations is commercially funded, especially in south and east Asia. More than 30 all-news channels now aspire to grab the attention of India's burgeoning middle class. But more remarkable has been the proliferation of state-funded channels – many of them with a global reach – in an era generally inimical to large-scale investment in public companies.

Many are "counter-hegemonic", set up with the explicit intention of challenging the "BBC/CNN approach" to world news. For some of these the challenge is relatively muted: though the stress may at times be significantly different, there isn't really a different paradigm. The aspiration is still balance and objectivity. France-24 and Al-Jazeera English (AJE, newsroom and anchor Ghida Fakhry pictured left) would fall into this group.

On other channels, the aim is more to confront. Some of these newcomers see claims to editorial impartiality as a cover for western hegemonic power and seek to redress the balance. Telesur would be in this category, as would Russia Today, China's CCTV-9 and Press TV in Iran. Their agenda may be to a lesser or greater degree a conscious one, but the outcome on screen is self-evident: it is hard to find criticism of host governments but easy to find opposition to George W. Bush.

These counter-hegemonic channels usually adopt the upbeat presentation and programme formats – complete with attractive, smiling presenters – of traditional western broadcasters, and eschew the dull, dirigiste and propagandistic style of state-owned stations of the past. Many offer a new voice and perspective in a crowded and uniform market. But though they aspire to reverse the dominant information flow from "the west to the rest", and to repeat the success of Al-Jazeera (Arabic), few operate in markets that replicate the predominantly government-controlled media market in which Al-Jazeera could become such an innovative force. For these others, operating in language areas of much greater choice and excitement, there is a real danger they will turn out to be vanity projects with negligible audiences, akin to a national airline with few passengers.

Despite its well-publicised problems, AJE has the greatest potential to break the mould. Although funded, like its Arabic sister station, by the gas revenues of Qatar, it operates in the global Anglophone market and enjoys considerably more editorial freedom from its paymaster than Telesur. It aims to offer something different to the BBC and CNN – but without a strongly partisan line. Its distinctiveness lies more in its non-western, "southern" perspective on, and choice of, the news.

Selection of stories is one way the western channels are accused of "attitudinal bias": plenty of focus on the victims of terrorist attacks in the west, but not much about the millions dying in the Democratic Republic of Congo or from treatable diseases in the developing world. At its worst, such bias can mean lack of scrutiny of, for example, western governments in the justification for the war in Iraq. AJE, though, has significantly more coverage than CNN and BBC World News of events in developing countries and less coverage of Europe and the US. Like the BBC and CNN, it covers its geographical home (the Middle East) more than the other two channels: the BBC has more coverage of Europe, and CNN of the US. But it also seems to have more content on under-reported parts of the world such as Sudan – in part, perhaps, because it enjoys more access.

AJE faces huge obstacles, not least finding a way into the US market and resolving the tension in its editorial vision as to the predominance or not of an Islamic slant to the news. But its supporters point out that CNN needed 10 years to bed down.

The boom in international news channels has important implications for the future direction of journalism. It feeds into the growing view that "opinionated news" is becoming more popular, especially among the young. Fox News is now the market leader in cable news in the US, prompting the longer-established CNN to have more opinionated anchors. In its June 2007 report "New News, Future News", Ofcom, the UK's media regulator, suggested impartiality may now be seen by young people and ethnic minorities as repellent, and may contribute to disengagement.

The principle of balance, fairness and neutrality has always been contested. But those who aspire to the ideal that impartiality can and should be preserved must understand the critique from those broadcasters, journalists and politicians who do not.

The writer is author of "Counter-Hegemonic News: A Case Study of Al-Jazeera (English) and Telesur", published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford

This article is part of a series on TV around the world. For earlier pieces, visit www.ft.com/arts/tv