Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arab news colossal, is celebrating 15 years of existence this year amid pomp and ceremony. What makes its festivity special is the controversy over its coverage of the Arab uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.
Unlike its English language sister, Al Jazeera International, the 24-hour Arabic news channel has departed from the universally accepted professional and ethical codes by taking the side of protesters and running uncorroborated footage taken mostly from the internet or supplied by anonymous sources.
That is why last month a number of Jordanian supporters of the Syrian regime rallied in front of the local offices of Al Jazeera in Jordan, slamming its sympathetic coverage of the opposition. Over the years the station’s offices were closed in a number of Arab capitals including Damascus, Kuwait City and Bahrain. In Cairo last summer and following the triumph of Egypt’s uprising, Al Jazeera’s office was ransacked by pro-government protesters.
A number of the news station’s broadcasters had resigned earlier this year to protest Al Jazeera’s uneven handling of Arab revolutions. Still the station continues to dedicate most of its news bulletins to ongoing uprisings in Yemen and Syria. In the latter it relies almost entirely on the unconfirmed eyewitness accounts of people who call in to give testimony.
In an article in The Huffington Post posted in November, Philip Seib, Director of the Centre on Public Diplomacy, wrote: “With great wealth but limited ‘hard power’, Qatar envisioned Al Jazeera enterprise as a soft power equalizer, enhancing the nation’s clout without resorting to the traditional process of building up military strength and then acting in menacing ways.”
No taboos
Launched in November 1996, Al Jazeera stunned the Arab audience by allowing its anchors and guests an unprecedented margin of freedom of expression. With no rivals to speak of, the free-to-air satellite news station tackled issues that most conservative Arab governments regarded as taboo. It quickly became the top Arab news channel with supporters and detractors hailing from all sides.
Its motto ‘Opinion and Alternate Opinion’ was anathema to most governments in the region where free press and freedom of expression were tightly controlled. Its correspondents covered opposition groups and its weekly and daily programmes allowed guests, most of whom were against their own governments, to speak their minds freely. By opening some of its programmes to call-ins Al Jazeera was fulfilling a promise to be ‘the voice of the voiceless’.
In a few years, Al Jazeera became the gadfly for many Arab regimes and the network’s custodian, the state of Qatar, watched as its relations soured with governments across the region over the station’s coverage. But that did not stop the news channel from expanding. In 1998, it became the only Arab news channel to provide live coverage of US Operation Desert Fox against Iraq, and later on became instrumental as a credible news source in covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Al Jazeera thrives on controversy and crisis. It never shied from inviting dissenting voices even if that meant jeopardising Doha’s relations with the US, Saudi Arabia and a long list of others. In November 2001, the network accused Nato of deliberately bombing its bureau in Kabul, and a month later one of its cameramen in Afghanistan was arrested and flown to Guantanamo allegedly because of ties to Osama Bin Laden.
New challenger
Bin Laden used the station following the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan to broadcast messages to the US and Muslim worlds, drawing a critical reaction from Washington. The station produced a series of documentaries on the war and Al Qaida and interviewed key figures who were being hunted by the Allied Forces. It also provided key coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon.
In 2003, one of Al Jazeera’s correspondents in Iraq, Tarek Ayoub, was killed in a US aerial bombing that targeted its Baghdad’s office. By that time a new challenger for the news station had arrived. The Saudi-owned Al Arabiya began broadcasting from Dubai while offering an alternative to Al Jazeera’s biased and sensational coverage.
Today the position of both is almost identical with regard to the revolutions that took place in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and are undergoing in Yemen and Syria. The competition between the two has driven both to cross the line in terms of acceptable professional norms.
Other than the Arabic and English language channels, Al Jazeera operates a popular news website for both stations, in addition to a documentary, children, live news and a bouquet of top-notch paid sports channels. The diversification was meant to achieve two things: expand the name brand’s footprint in the Arab region and beyond, and generate cash from the sports bouquet.
Financial information on Al Jazeera’s operation are hard to get by since the channel is believed to be funded by the Qatar royal family. The only commercials one sees on the Arabic channel are by state owned companies (oil, gas, airlines). Few trading companies, Gulf or Arab, would use the popular channel to promote products for fear of being penalised by governments.
Al Jazeera English, which relies heavily on former BBC journalists, has become popular in Asia and Africa.
Despite the controversy that has surrounded Al Jazeera, and Qatar’s role in it for that matter, the station has undoubtedly given a big push to press freedom and political discourse in the Arab world. It remains popular for that reason and it is basking in its glory today, 15 years on, because of its one-sided coverage of the Arab Spring.
Osama Al Sharif is a veteran journalist and political commentator based in Amman.