Al Jazeera expelled from Iraq

[Sten Sture]

Part of the reason that aJ had the live interview with the Iraqi Info Min yesterday was to patch up the PR side of the dispute. Gotta hand it to aJ, they played their cards well.

If I were a Jewish investor I would certainly try to invest in a business like this, it would make a great hedge!

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Sten Sture



Arrian - you are messing up the sensationalism! To keep pace with the war journalism you have to take a simple story, like this one and completely screw up the facts!

It has been amazing how many simple things like this have gotten completely mis-reported in the media. It makes me wonder how they ever get any facts correct.

Damn me and my anti-sensationalism!

Sensationalism in the media is one of my main pet peeves.

By the way, it seems AJ did in fact play this very well, and won.

-Arrian

[RAW_OmarBKhatab]

Originally posted by Agathon


Eh? [slaps self to make sure not dreaming]

Dont believe me? Can the "commerce department" and find out who is the owner of AJ.

A Jewish owns the AJ news service

[Ramo]

Are you seriously saying that the Emir of Qatar is Jewish?

This has got to be a DL.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Didn't you notice the yarmulka on his head?

[Ramo]

[gsmoove23]

Pretty good article on Al Jazeera, this is just an excerpt.

http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2001/aljazeera_oct01/aljazeera_oct01.html

There is little question that Al-Jazeera has revolutionized Arabic-language television news in a region that for decades has been accustomed to the stale, heavily censored offerings of state-controlled television. Founded in 1996 with a start-up grant of US$140 million from the Qatari government, Al-Jazeera has quickly become the most watched—and most controversial—news channel in the region, winning over viewers with its bold, uncensored news coverage, its unbridled political debates, and its call-in-show formats that tackle a range of sensitive social, political, and cultural issues.

Governments from Algeria to Yemen have lodged complaints against the station at one time or another. Some, like Tunisia and Libya, have temporarily withdrawn their ambassadors from Qatar's capital, Doha, to protest the appearance of political dissidents on talk shows or slights made against their leaders.

A few years ago, Algeria reportedly cut power in part of Algiers to prevent residents from watching a show about the country's brutal civil war. Kuwait temporarily banned the channel's reporters from the country after a caller phoned in and criticized the Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah live on the air. Recently, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority temporarily closed Al-Jazeera's Ramallah bureau because of a promotional trailer for a documentary series about the Lebanese civil war that contained an unflattering image of the Palestinian leader.

On October 3, at a press conference in Washington, D.C., Qatari ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani acknowledged that U.S. officials had asked him to use his influence to rein in Al-Jazeera's news coverage. [Read CPJ's alert] "We heard from the U.S. administration, and also from the previous administration," the emir, referring to both the Bush and Clinton administrations, was quoted as saying. "Naturally we take these things as a kind of advice." Earlier, the U.S. Embassy in Qatar had filed a formal diplomatic complaint with Qatari authorities regarding Al-Jazeera's coverage. Bush administration officials made it clear afterward that they were upset by what they viewed as Al-Jazeera's unbalanced and anti-American coverage. Officials said they feared that Al-Jazeera's replays of its exclusive 1998 interview with Osama bin Laden were stirring up fundamentalist feelings in the region.

U.S. officials were also bothered by airtime given to analysts who expressed anti-American views or attacked U.S. policies in the Middle East. Specifically, the U.S. government was angered when Al-Jazeera broadcast an unconfirmed report that Taliban forces had captured U.S. Special Forces troops inside Afghanistan. Later, U.S. government officials expressed concern that taped messages from Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al-Qaeda, originally aired on Al-Jazeera and rebroadcast by U.S. networks could contain secret codes instructing operatives in the United States to carry out further attacks.

After Secretary Powell's meeting with Emir Hamad, a State Department official told CNN that Powell and the emir "had a frank exchange" on the issue and "there should have been no mistake of where we are coming from."

Said U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher during a daily briefing a few days later: "We would certainly like to see them tone down the rhetoric."


Makes it look as if America is jumpin on the bandwagon with all the other arabic countries.