Tag Archives: Al Jazeera

BuzzMachine: ‘Cable companies, add Al Jazeera English NOW!’

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Writing on his BuzzMachine blog, Jeff Jarvis has called for US cable networks to start carrying Al Jazeera’s English-language network.

Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera has been covering the civilian unrest in Egypt but was effectively shut down by the Egyptian government on Sunday, according to reports. In the following days Al Jazeera journalists have been reportedly arrested and detained in the country.

Jarvis acknowledges that Al Jazeera English is available to stream online but tells cable companies that this just isn’t enough.

Yes, we can watch AJE on the internet. But as much of an internet triumphalist as I am, internet streaming is not going to have the same impact–political and education impact–that putting AJE on the cable dial would have. I can watch AJE in the Zurich hotel room where I am now; I want to be able to watch it on my couch at home.

Full post on BuzzMachine at this link.

The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog has also picked up on the difficulty of accessing Al Jazeera English from within the US. Media Reporter Brian Stelter talks about the issue in an NYT video.

As the uprising in Egypt nears its second week, a lot of people are calling this Al Jazeera’s moment. The Qatar-based broadcaster has been showing us pictures that most US broadcasters haven’t been able to get … Al Jazeera also has an English-language channel, but a lot of people don’t know it because it’s very hard to access in the United States … Most of us can’t watch it in the US unless we watch on our computers.

New York Times considers creating own in-house WikiLeaks

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The New York Times is considering setting up its own in-house version of WikiLeaks, according to editor Bill Keller.

Keller told Yahoo’s The Cutline blog that he is “looking at something along the lines” of Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit, which was instrumental in the recent publication of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera and the Guardian.

“Nothing is nailed down”, according to Keller, but he has sketched out the idea behind the possible division:

A small group from computer-assisted reporting and interactive news, with advice from the investigative unit and the legal department, has been discussing options for creating a kind of EZ Pass lane for leakers.

The New York Times was one of three media partners – including the Guardian and der Spiegel – that worked with WikiLeaks on the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.

The NYT was also one of five newspapers that had advanced access to WikiLeaks’ next release, the US embassy cables. It was subsequently revealed however that the NYT was forced to obtain its copy of the cable from the Guardian, having been cut out of the loop by WikiLeaks.

Given the difficulty Keller had in obtaining advanced access to the embassy cables, and the general risks of relying on organisations such as WikiLeaks, we may yet see many more national news organisations following suit and establishing their own sections to deal directly with leaks.

Full story on The Cutline at this link.

Al-Jazeera offices in Ramallah entered by security forces, reports correspondent

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Al-Jazeera English correspondent Alan Fisher reports that the news organisation’s offices in Ramallah, Palestine were entered by security forces earlier this afternoon, followed by an “angry crowd” which has sprayed graffiti on the walls.

Fisher is reporting on the situation using his Twitter account: twitter.com/alanfisher.

Al-Jazeera began publishing leaked documents about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process today in partnership with the Guardian. The documents accuse the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) of making a secret agreement to accept Israel’s annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in East Jerusalem.

Comment is Free: Al-Jazeera is not Qatar’s ‘poodle’

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Mark Seddon, a journalist formerly with Al-Jazeera, responds to yesterday’s reports on US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks that suggested the Arabic arm of the broadcaster has been used as a “tool of foreign policy” by the Qatari government,

[T]he idea that al-Jazeera tempers its editorial content at the behest of the emir of Qatar, who mainly finances it, is possibly as fanciful as the WikiLeaks report that US diplomats believed their South Korean counterparts when they said that China might recognise a unified Korea under the aegis of Seoul. Conjecture does not always meet with reality. Al-Jazeera, in its swashbuckling and sometimes disorganised way, has shown itself quite adept at resisting pressure wherever it may come from.

Full article on Comment is Free at this link…

Robert Fisk: ‘Journalists have become prisoners of the language of power’

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From a speech given by Robert Fisk, The Independent’s Middle East correspondent, to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on May 23:

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words – and the use of words.

It is about semantics.

It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history.

More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.

Fisk goes on to discuss the words and narratives inherited by journalists when reporting on conflict and war, and how this affects the media’s ability to challenge those in power if it is speaking the same language.

Full text of speech at this link…

Committee to Protect Journalists: Bahrain government freezes Al Jazeera operations ‘indefinitely’

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The Bahraini government has ‘indefinitely’ suspended Al Jazeera’s English and Arabic channels from reporting in the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports.

On Tuesday, Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture and Information decided to “temporarily freeze the activities of the Bahrain bureau of the Qatari satellite news channel Al Jazeera for having violated professional norms and for failing to observe laws and procedures regulating journalism, printing and publishing,” according to the official Bahrain News Agency.

The ministry’s decision comes just one day after Al Jazeera aired a program about poverty in Bahrain.

Al Jazeera was previously banned from 2002-7.

Full post at this link…

Could Iceland’s journalism haven create a ‘ripple effect’?

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Al Jazeera English’s Listening Post has an excellent film about the new Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) proposal, which, if successful, could make Iceland an investigative journalism haven.

  • Read more about IMMI here: http://immi.is/?l=en: “The goal of the IMMI proposal is to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedom of expression around world and in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers. To this end the legal environment should be explored in such a way that the goals can be defined, and changes to law or new law proposals can be prepared. The legal environments of other countries should be considered, with the purpose of assembling the best laws to make Iceland a leader of freedoms of expression and information.”
  • Wikileaks.org, which helped draft the law, also has more information here (its site currently has restricted content, as it prepares for relaunch and seeks more funds).

In the Listening Post film, which also features Index on Censorship news editor Padraig Reidy, Wikileaks’ editor Julian Assange explains IMMI’s limits as well as its potential: “It’s important to remember that the IMMI appears to be a good bullet, but it’s not a magic bullet, so there will be many cases where there is brutal suppression of the press that IMMI doesn’t have substantial effect on.”

IMMI’s proponents hope new legislation will help change tough libel laws around the world, with a “ripple effect” in the EU and beyond.

NYTimes.com: Interview with Guantanamo detainee and journalist Sami al-Hajj

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Brian Stelter profiles Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was held for six years at the terrorism detention centre Guantanamo Bay, and looks at how Al Hajj’s experience has shaped his reporting: “The captive has become the correspondent.”

Full story at this link…

RSF: Yemen’s ‘harassment and denigration’ of Al Jazeera

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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has issued a statement condemning Yemen’s ‘harassment and denigration’ of  Al Jazeera television, including a threatening telephone call to Sanaa bureau chief, Mourad Hashem, earlier this week.

RSF said that Al Jazeera has been branded by the authorities as the ‘enemy of a united Yemen’ because the channel covered unrest in the south of the country.

“The authorities use and abuse defence of national unity to censor media that try to cover events in southern Yemen,” the press freedom organisation said in the release.

Full statement at this link…

Arabian Business: Al Jazeera English ‘signs first major US TV deal’

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“Al Jazeera English will begin its foray into the American market on July 1 after signing its first major US distribution deal with a cable TV company in the Washington DC area,” Arabian Business exclusively reports.

According to AB’s report, Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, said in an interview: “On July 1 we [AJE] are going to launch the first operation in cable distribution in the United States.”

Full story at this link…

(Hat tip: @amonck)