Al-Jazeera is winning crowds every night through the eloquence of its news female anchors, Jumana Nammour and Kaduja Bin Guna, and economics expert Farah al-Baraqaui. While state televisions and oil-funded channels traditionally limited their staff by censoring them and denying them the right to decide freely about their program content and what guests to invite, Al Jazeera's success is due precisely to the freedom its programmers and speakers enjoy, which allows them to become credible communicators, claims investigator Fatema Mernissi.
The novelty in this "digital Islam galaxy" is that many Arab men craving for their own emancipation from authoritarian censorship have become alert enough to de-connect power from sex: many of the satellite broadcasting male viewers do not seem to think anymore that their masculinity is threatened if women show their power. They don't seem to see the sex difference as fatally locked into a power struggle. The problem now is how to interpret this new phenomenon? Is it just a transient fad or are we witnessing a civilizational shift in the perception of the difference: are the satellite-connected Moslems growing to perceive the sexual difference as enriching?.
Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) was extremely popular when it first started in 1991 but Arab viewers deserted it in 1996 when Al Jazeera gave them the opportunity to see uncensored news 24 hours a day. The other reason was that MBC's systematic censorship was projected through the superficiality of its entertainment programs, alienating viewers, especially women.
Tapping the humanist dimension of Islam, that of using the brain as instrument to learn and dialogue with the other nations is what explains both Al Jazeera's success and the failure of all the other Arab networks who are losing money in financing commercial programs no one wants to watch, claims Mernissi.
The authors of this study believe that Al Jazeera is possibly a sine qua non to more effective media diplomacy and better understanding between the United States and the Middle East.
Coverage of the war in Iraq by the large media corporations laid bare yet again -among other things- the lack of diversity in the news. What we see are the same sources repeating the same story all around the world, which severely limits the diversity of opinions and trivializes the analyses offered. This report provides information to analyze this trend.
Two US missiles hit the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera television on April 8 2003, killing and wounding two staff in what the Qatar-based Arabic news network charged was a deliberate strike.
Hacker attacks and technical glitches have caused a string of headaches for a new English-language website launched by Arab satellite TV network Al-Jazeera. The Qatar-based network has faced a storm of criticism in the United States for broadcasting Iraqi footage of five US prisoners of war and at least eight corpses. Its English site was quickly hit by hacker attacks - as was the Arabic-language site.
Al-Jazeera, whose slogan is "The Opinion... and the Other Opinion," has been periodically targeted by Arab leaders and rival Arab media over the past two years. Information ministers from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates accused Al Jazeera of "insulting and slandering" the five states during a regular meeting in the Oman capital of Muscat.
Al-Jazeera has claimed British forces in Basra banned the network from reporting in the southern Iraqi city. The Doha-based channel issued a statement condemning "the ban" and said this was the third time British forces had imposed a ban on its reporters.
The Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith say they will fight an application from Al-Jazeera for a digital cable television licence. The two groups say the station vilifies Jewish people. But many Arab-Canadians say the Qatar-based network, sometimes referred to as the Arab world's CNN during the Iraq war, simply provides another point of view.
Once London-based, the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) is now firmly ensconced in Dubai. Interview with Director General Ali Al-Hedeithy and Head of News Salah Negm.
In the summer of 2002, Al-Qa'ida chose Yosri Fouda, Al Jazeera's London bureau chief, for a unique interview with two of its most wanted leaders and gave him the first direct admission intended for public eyes and ears that, yes, they really did do it.
Despite financial problems and political dilemmas, the channel is still considered one of the major Arab news channels, even if it has not, according to many observers, achieved the same level of professionalism as Al-Jazeera, Abu Dhabi Satellite TV, and MBC. Official site. In arab.
