As the unrest moved closer to home, critics say, the limits of al-Jazeera’s independence were exposed: Although it supported uprisings against some longtime Arab regimes, the network, and its owner, clearly drew the line when another Persian Gulf monarchy was threatened.
“In other Arab countries, the channel was clearly on the side of the uprisings,” said Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics at Columbia University. But in Bahrain, “it pretended to be impartial while pushing the line of the Bahraini regime.”
Al-Jazeera executives say both its Arabic-language channel and the global news channel al-Jazeera English operate independently of state control. But the broadcaster is the most prominent outlet of the government-owned Qatar Media, which is led by a cousin of the emir, and a 2009 U.S. Embassy cable made public by WikiLeaks describes al-Jazeera as “an instrument of Qatari influence.”
“They have lost their credibility in the Arab world, by either covering developments one sided — or completely ignoring them,” said As’ad AbuKhalil, author of the Angry Arab News Service, a widely read blog about media coverage of the Arab world, and a prominent voice among the growing number of academics and media analysts speaking out against the network. “They became a typical regime station,” he wrote May 7. “Their political agenda is not even masked.”
‘A voice to the voiceless’
Al-Jazeera’s slogan says it strives to give “a voice to the voiceless,” and the network built its reputation with its critical coverage of the the Iraq war. Since then — operating from one of the world’s smallest, and richest, countries — its ratings have soared, making it the dominant Arabic-language news channel in the region.
Journalists working at the broadcaster’s frenetic nerve center in Doha say they are not activists but are proud of the role the network has played during the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
“The revolutions would have happened without al-Jazeera,” said Satnam Matharu, its director of communications. “But our cameras protected those voices calling for democracy. We gave them a sense of security.”
Al-Jazeera’s intense reporting on the Arab uprisings has brought international praise. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in March hailed the broadcaster for bringing what she called “real news” and changing people’s attitudes. On May 4, al-Jazeera English, launched in 2006, received the Columbia Journalism Award for its coverage.
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