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This
note considers Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera.
It covers -
introduction
al-Jazeera ('The Peninsula' or 'island') was launched
in 1996 as a 24 hour Arabic satellite news channel.
Its establishment followed the abandonment of the BBC
World Service Arabic television station in 1996, a co-venture
with a Saudi Arabian company that failed after the station
had the temerity to report on public executions under
sharia law. Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of
Qatar provided US$150 million to launch al-Jazeera as
a replacement, attracting substantial staff from London.
The Emir is believed to provide an ongoing subsidy of
US$30 million per year, variously attributed to interest
in encouraging growth of civil society among the Islamic
states or in the words of Olivier Da Lage as a mechanism
for putting the emirate on the map ("Al Jazeera is
for Qatar what the casinos are for Monaco").
It gained an international profile during turn of the
millennium wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both as a representation
of the 'Arab voice' in reporting events in the Middle
East and because it encountered fewer difficulties than
those faced by Western media organisations in reporting
from that region.
al-Jazeera scored global attention after 11 September
2001 by broadcasting videos from Osama bin Laden and his
associates. That incurred criticism by figures such as
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that reinforced its
legitimacy in much of the Middle East and among parts
of the West. Willingness to criticise local autocrats
(other than the dynasts in Qatar) has also helped: a recurrent
joke is that "about the only thing the Arab information
ministers can all agree on" is the desirability of
boycotting al-Jazeera's advertising.
expansion
Al Jazeera announced in late 2006 that it planned to launch
news channels in Arabic and English, sports and children's
channels, a pan-Arab newspaper, web sites and blogs. Its
English-language Al Jazeera International (broadcasting
from network hubs in Qatar, London, Washington and Kuala
Lumpur) was launched in November 2006, ostensibly - in
the words of the New York Times - as
for
the developing world what Al Jazeera became to the Arab
world: a champion of forgotten causes, a news organization
willing to take the contrarian view and to risk being
controversial.
Delete
the reference to the Arab world and that aim could have
been articulated by Murdoch's Fox or precursors such as
Scripps, Pulitzer and Hearst.
studies
Perspectives are provided in Marc Lynch's Voices of
the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al Jazeera and Middle East
Politics Today (New York: Columbia Uni Press 2006),
the upbeat The Al Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives
on New Arab Media (Boulder: Paradigm Press 2005)
edited by Mohamed Zayani, Al-Jazeera: How the Free
Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle
East (Cambridge: Westview Press 2002) by Mohammed
El-Nawawy & Adel Iskander and Al-Jazeera: How
Arab TV News Challenged the World (London: Abacus
2005) by Hugh Miles.
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