News From The Bbc Cnn And Al Jazeera

"The three gigantic media corporations, the BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera, are largely responsible for refining and shaping our views of events in the world. Their informational and communicative arm is unprecedented in the history of human communication. This book deals with their Middle East coverage, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and the war in Iraq."--[book cover].

The battle for hearts and minds in the Middle East is being fought not on the streets of Baghdad, but on the newscasts and talk shows of Al Jazeera. The future of China is being shaped not by Communist Party bureaucrats, but by bloggers working quietly in cyber cafes. The next attacks by al Qaeda will emerge not from Osama bin Laden's cave, but from cells around the world connected by the Internet. In these and many other instances, traditional ways of reshaping global politics have been superseded by the influence of new media--satellite television, the Internet, and other high-tech tools. What is involved is more than a refinement of established practices. We are seeing a comprehensive reconnecting of the global village and a reshaping of how the world works. Al Jazeera is a paradigm of new media's influence. Ten years ago, there was much talk about "the CNN effect," the theory that news coverage--especially gripping visual storytelling--was influencing foreign policy throughout the world. Today, "the Al Jazeera effect" takes that a significant step further. The concept encompasses the use of new media as tools in every aspect of global affairs, ranging from democratization to terrorism, and including the concept of "virtual states." "The media" are no longer just the media. They have a larger popular base than ever before and, as a result, have unprecedented impact on international politics. The media can be tools of conflict and instruments of peace; they can make traditional borders irrelevant and unify peoples scattered across the globe. This phenomenon, the Al Jazeera effect, is reshaping the world.

Although Al Jazeera English has yet to receive to receive the attention accorded to its Arabic-language elder sibling, it is in many ways the more interesting of the two. It seeks to redefine global news coverage by focusing on areas that are traditionally neglected by most news organizations, and its potential audience is many times larger than that of the Arabic channel. This will be the first book to thoroughly examine this channel's coverage methods, effects on its audience, and its place in the world of mediated geopolitics.Al Jazeera recognized that if it was to expand its worldwide influence, it could not do so wholly in Arabic. And so, in 2006, it launched Al Jazeera English, the first English-language news channel to be headquartered in the Middle East. With its principal broadcast centers in Doha, Washington, London, and Kuala Lumpur, the channel faced the task of proving itself to be more than a curiosity and just a junior version of the all-news English-language channels such as the BBC or CNN. After several years of operation, Al Jazeera English seems well on its way to defining its place in the market. The breadth of its coverage, particularly its emphasis on reporting from the global South, has distinguished it from many of its competitors. Thorough coverage from the Middle East and from Africa provides a perspective that other major satellite channels have rarely offered their audiences. Initially, Al Jazeera English was available to 80 million cable and satellite households. It was, however, accessible by only a small number of viewers in the United States (mainly those accessing it through several online providers) primarily because of political reasons. Whatever the political back-story may be, gaining access to a larger global market will depend on audience demand. If Al Jazeera English does a better job of covering major stories, particularly in the Middle East and the global South, than other channels do, and if its competitors find themselves saying, "As Al Jazeera English reported today . . .," news consumers will eventually demand access. This book will examine these political issues and will also analyze the channel's audience base, particularly in Africa and South Asia. The book will also offer evaluations of Al Jazeera English's defining moments to date - its reporting during the 2008-2009 war in Gaza (written by Palestinian and Israeli scholars), and its coverage of the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy in 2010. The volume will also consider Al Jazeera English in the context of public diplomacy and the growing significance of diasporic populations.

With more than fifty million viewers, Al Jazeera is one of the most widely watched news channels in the world. It's also one of the most controversial. Set up by the eccentric Emir of Qatar, who turned a failed BBC Arabic television project into an Arab news channel, Al Jazeera quickly became a household name after September 11th by delivering some of the biggest scoops in television history, including airing a taped speech from Osama bin Laden. Lambasted as a mouthpiece for Al Qaeda, little is actually known about Al Jazeera and its operations. Financed by one of the weathiest countries in the world, Al Jazeera quickly established itself as the premiere news channel in the Islamic world by covering events Arabs cared about in a way they had never seen before. However, accusations of ties to Al Qaeda continue to plague it. Their journalists have been accused of spying for everyone from Mossad to Saddam Hussein, sometimes simultaneously. This the story behind the Arab news channel that makes the news.

The Middle East has been a particular focus of global crisis reporting. Yet, international coverage of these conflicts has historically been presented through a 'Western' perspective. The absence of Arab voices in the global public sphere has created a discursive gap between the Middle East and the rest of the world. The arrival of Al Jazeera English might, therefore, be regarded as an attempt to bridge this gap by broadcasting discourses from and about the Arab world. Using a framing analysis of selected news reports by Al Jazeera English before and after the so-called 'Arab Spring' protests, this book considers Al Jazeera English's position in the global news environment and identifies the extent to which it addresses this gap between the Arab and global spheres.

"Ever since its launch over a decade ago, Al-Jazeera has influenced broadcast journalism globally and transformed the Arab television news sphere. Its coverage of wars and conflicts in the region has earned the pan-Arabic news network many admirers and a few powerful adversaries, as Tal Samuel-Azran's book ably demonstrates. This is an empirically strong contribution to the literature on the politics of global news."---Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication, University of Westminster, London --Book Jacket.

This book analyzes how and why Al Jazeera English (AJE) became the channel of choice to understand the massive protests across the Arab world 2011. Aiming to explain the ‘Al Jazeera moment,’ it tracks the channel’s bumpy road towards international recognition in a longitudinal, in-depth analysis of the channel’s editorial profile and strategies. Studying AJE from its launch in mid-November 2006 to the ‘Arab Spring’, it explains and problematizes the channel’s ambitious editorial agenda and strategies, examines the internal conflicts, practical challenges and minor breakthroughs in its formative years. The Al Jazeera-phenomenon has received massive attention, but it remains under-researched. The growth of transnational satellite television has transformed the global media landscape into a complex web of multi-vocal, multimedia and multi-directional flows. Based on a combination of policy-, production- and content analysis of comprehensive empirical data the book offers an innovative perspective on the theorization of global news contra-flows. By problematizing the distinctive characteristics of AJE, it examines the strategic motivation behind the channel and the ways in which its production processes and news profile are meant to be different from its Anglo-American competitors. These questions underscore a central nexus of the book: the changing relationship between transnational satellite news and power.

In 2006, the Al Jazeera Media Network sought to penetrate the United States media sphere, the world's most influential national market for English language news. These unyielding ambitions surprised those who knew the network as the Arab media service President Bush lambasted as "hateful propaganda" in his 2004 State of the Union address. The world watched skeptically yet curiously as Al Jazeera labored to establish a presence in the famously insular American market. The network's decade-long struggle included both fleeting successes, like the sudden surge of popular interest during the Arab spring, as well as momentous failures. The April 2016 closure of its $2 billion Al Jazeera America channel was just one of a series of setbacks. An Unlikely Audience investigates the inner workings of a complex news organization fighting to overcome deep obstacles, foster strategic alliances and build its identity in a country notoriously disinterested in international news. William Youmans argues counter-intuitively that making sense of Al Jazeera's tortured push into the United States as a national news market, actually requires a local lens. He reveals the network's appeal to American audiences by presenting its three independent US-facing subsidiaries in their primary locales of production: Al Jazeera English (AJE) in Washington, DC, Al Jazeera America (AJAM) in New York, and AJ+ in San Francisco. These cities are centers of vital industries-media-politics, commercial TV news and technology, respectively. As Youmans shows, the success of the outlets hinged on the locations in which they operated because Al Jazeera assimilated aspects of their core industries. An Unlikely Audience proves that place is critical to the formation and evolution of multi-national media organizations, despite the rise of communication technologies that many believe make location less relevant. Mining data from over 50 interviews since 2010, internal documents, and original surveys, the book offers a brisk and authoritative account of the world's most recognizable media-brand and its decade-long ingress into the US - crucial background for Al Jazeera's continued expansion in the United States.