WHY AL JAZEERA ARABIC IS AT THE CENTRE OF DISPUTE
A news channel accused of harbouring extremist sympathies faces an uncertain future
Since it started broadcasting in 1996, Al Jazeera Arabic has carried the slogan “An opinion and a counter opinion”.
It was designed to reflect the channel’s ambitions of stirring debate. More than 20 years later that slogan may have become its Achilles’ heel as the network faces accusations of providing a platform for extremists.
The Qatari- owned news channel that pioneered a change in the landscape of Arab media in its coverage and reach is at the centre of the political dispute pitting Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain against Qatar.
“The closure of Al Jazeera channels and its offshoots” was number six on the list of 13 demands handed to Doha by the Arab states.
Why Al Jazeera? And is the goal a shut down or a restructuring?
A war of narratives
From the start, Al Jazeera made a splash, upsetting Arab governments from Algeria to Saudi Arabia and Palestine. It became the first Arabic channel to report from the Israeli Knesset and interview its politicians.
It gained steam and topped the ratings while indulging in what the late intellectual Fouad Ajami called “the Hollywood-isation of news with an abandon that would make the Fox News Channel blush”.
“Day in and day out, Al Jazeera deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage”, Ajami wrote in a 2001 profile in The New York Times.
It is Al Jazeera Arabic, not its English sister channel or the online offshoots, that is at the centre of the Gulf dispute, said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.
From providing air time for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to carrying the state- ments of ISIL’s propaganda on its “Amaaq” site, Al Jazeera Arabic has provided a platform for extremist and internationally designated terrorist groups.
The criticism focuses on the Arabic channel because “there is a war of narratives taking place in the Arab world and Al Jazeera is seen as a threat to the narrative that Qatar’s foes are advancing as a part of a major political struggle”.
The struggle, said Mr Telhami, involved Arab governments “that see all political Islam, including the Muslim Brotherhood, as militant, and whose existence and empowerment fuels terrorism”. They also view Al Jazeera’s coverage through that prism.
Alberto Fernandez, a career US diplomat who is vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, said Al Jazeera’s “main problem is that it often mainstreams bigoted, intolerant discourse”.
Mr Fernandez has appeared frequently on Al Jazeera Arabic in the past 12 years.
He recalled one appearance in 2015 “where I found out that I was matched against a Sweden- based Iraqi exile, a former Communist who had, on a previous appearance on Al Jazeera, made clear his support for the Islamic State while on the air”.
One of the most controversial Al Jazeera segments featured Youssef Al Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric based in Doha.
Mr Al Qaradawi has used his spot on the show to praise Hitler and to describe the Holocaust as divine retribution.
He also used his segment to criticise other Gulf countries, including the UAE. His appearances were a key part of the earlier dispute with Qatar and its neighbours in 2014.
Al Jazeera is also regularly criticised for its support of various militant groups.
The channel celebrated on air the birthday of assassinated Hizbollah fighter Samir Kuntar and asked if the Alawites of Syria should be killed.
These examples illustrate a discourse “that helps the narrative of ISIL and Al Qaeda and is a huge problem in the Middle East”, said Mr Fernandez.
A former Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent said: “There was no censorship in the news channel, but there was clearly a biased editorial line that favoured the Islamists.”
The staffer, who resigned before the Arab Spring, tied Al Jazeera Arabic’s editorial line to Qatar’s foreign policy. “They are the same.”
A lapse in the standing of Arab media was broadly felt after the Arab Spring, said Mr Telhami, author of The World through Arab Eyes.
“Qatar’s role as a country has changed, and with it the way Al Jazeera has been seen. Satellite TV was spreading and they became as effective by catering to pan-Arab and pan-Islamic issues,” he said.
While Al Jazeera “has been open to opposing views, it also has not deviated much from official Qatari policy in issues like Syria and Libya – issues over which the Arab public had become very divided,” Mr Telhami said.
“Other Arab governments, threatened by the uprisings, moved to control the media narrative even more.”
In Syria, Al Jazeera Arabic received the most criticism for twice interviewing Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, head of Jabhat Fatah Al Sham, Al Qaeda’s Syria wing until July last year when they claimed to have cut ties and were rebranded as Jabhat Al Nusra.
“Al Jazeera does this, but then there are stations in other Arab cities who do the same,” said Mr Fernandez.
“There is the propaganda of sectarian militias and their counterparts in bigoted, poisonous stations like Wesal TV.” Wesal is an anti-Shiite outlet subsidised by Salafists across the region.
Way forward?
While the debate since the list of demands was handed to Qatar on June 22 has centred on shutting down Al Jazeera, sources involved in the talks between Doha and the Arab states are instead offering ideas to restructure and rebrand Al Jazeera Arabic.
A change in message and mission could form a path to a solution without closing the news channel, said two diplomats involved in the talks.
Mr Telhami said Al Jazeera’s early success came from the fact that the Qatari government was mostly trying to gain market share, rather than pitch a particular story, and that the network “tried to cater to Arab hearts and minds, not shape them”.
After the Arab Spring, Qatar’s foreign policy ambitions to support Islamist groups in countries such as Egypt and Libya became constraining factors for the network.
Ideas to create a new board, restructure programming and steer clear of incitement when it came to Egypt are on the table, said the two diplomats.
“The problem is Qatari foreign policy more than AJA itself,” said Mr Fernandez. “The station is a reflection of that policy in terms of who is criticised and who is coddled.”
He did not feel that demanding changes from Al Jazeera is an encroachment on freedom of the press.
“What we are talking about here is bias, not censorship, and taking conscious positions that promote hatred and lead to violence.”