…with the re-launch of Al Jazeera’s English site.
A quick scan shows stories talking about how “rational”, “pragmatic”, and “moderate” Hamas is, stories on Israel’s policy of assassinating terrorists being the stumbling block to peace (with no mention of terror attacks against Israelis), and a poll in which 44% of people believe that the US attacked Iraq to gain control of its oil. And that’s only the front page.
Call me crazy, but this looks an awful lot like most other news sites out there. Which probably speaks more to their bias than to Al-Jazeera’s “objectivity”.
A more mundane reason for the resemblance is that a pretty high proportion of the stories seem to be sourced to wires (AFP, AP, Reuters), not written in-house. The Al Jazeera English format happens to have the story source credited at the bottom, not at the top, so it’s not as noticeable as on news sites which do it the other way around.
Another, related reason is that the Al Jazeera English site isn’t a translation so much as a separate, English-language operation — their own staff writers as well as Arabic-to-English translators who have access to the Arabic-language material with which to create English-language content.
Which makes sense from a commmercial and editorial perspective, the two that are relevant to Al Jazeera: the goal is to attract readers and to provide high-quality “product” targetting the readership.
So Al Jazeera English is a different team from Al Jazeera Online, which is itself demarcated from Al Jazeera Satellite, albeit less so — again in the latter case, not surprising, given the relative straightforwardness of transferring same-language material over.
That said, though, one thing that isn’t so different from the Online site in Arabic and in English is the predominance of news items that pose a relationship between Arab countries and non-Arab countries — and scarcity of news items which investigate matters internal to Arab countries.
Which probably has something to do with bias, and probably has something to do with the predominant news narrative that Al Jazeera has built as its framework — a story of being the news source by and for the watan al-‘araby, the Arabic homeland, which (not coincidentally) happens to serve as a convenient way of knitting together its audience.
But it has at least as much to do with the political environment in which Al Jazeera operates: its goal is to be a successful network, and no matter how much it flirts with controversy, it can’t afford to have its journalists perma-banned from the places it covers — as they were for a bit during the last Gulf War, at which time their competitors al-Arabiyya and Dubai TV picked up the slack without skipping a beat.
Point, I guess, being that such mega-operations as Al Jazeera are hardly the panacea that some have weirdly claimed. At best, they loosen things up a tiny bit; government censorship is still a lot stronger than any newsroom when it comes to stifling criticism of the politics under the purvey of such governments.
“the predominance of news items that pose a relationship between Arab countries and non-Arab countries — and scarcity of news items which investigate matters internal to Arab countries.”
Not much different from CNN, Fox, Global etc., which cover the news as it relates to the US or Canada, posing their own West vs. the rest relationships.
Not really, no. It’s easy enough to visit the CNN Web site and look at how it covers its home market, the U.S.. Most of the coverage looks into U.S. matters.
The idea that, everyone in the world, the same freedom of the press issues obtain, or that the same media cultures prevail in all places, is certainly incorrect. The Arab world’s media system is not identical to the U.S.’s, nor to Canada’s; to imply that it did would be to misunderstand each of them.