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Al Jazeera English: The Most Hated Name in News
- s3graham 16y agoIt's totally silly, but I love hearing the accents change with each story.
- pavs 16y agoI don't see a single ad on Al Jazeera english website. How do they survive? I know it is funded by a rich seikh.
- retube 16y agofrom Wikipedia: >The original Aljazeera channel was started in 1996 by an emiri decree with a loan of 500 million Qatari riyals (US$137 million) from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa.[2][3] By its funding through loans or grants rather than direct government subsidies, the channel maintains independence of its editorial policy.[4][5] The channel began broadcasting in late 1996, with many staff joining from the BBC World Service's Saudi-co-owned Arabic language TV station, which had shut down in April 1996 after two years of operation because of censorship demands by the Saudi Arabian government.[6] Following the initial US$ 137 million grant from the Emir of Qatar, Al Jazeera had aimed to become self-sufficient through advertising by 2001, but when this failed to occur, the Emir agreed to several consecutive loans[3] on a year-by-year basis (US$30 million in 2004,[7] according to Arnaud de Borchgrave). Other major sources of income include advertising, cable subscription fees, broadcasting deals with other companies, and sale of footage.[8] In 2000, advertising accounted for 40% of the station's revenue.[9]
- mahmud 16y agoAl-Jazeera English doesn't have ads but Al-Jazeera's Arabic channels do. Al-Jazeera is about 7-9 TV stations, mobile applications, and websites. I listen to their Arabic podcasts and 90% of them make me fear for their safety. The ungrateful little bastards went on air reporting on the discrepancy between oil exports reported by Qatar (their host nation) and the figures reported by the international markets. Concluding something like 25% was missing from the total! I was certain I will not see al-Jazeera again, but they went on just fine, back to harassing other governments the very next day. Their Op-Ed program (in Arabic: "al-itijah al-mu`akis" الاتجاه المعاكس) calls for the overthrow of all the non-democratic regimes in the middle-east, by which it means ALL of them.
- sekou 16y ago"And what of the assumption that everyone with access to the Internet or a camera phone will fill the gap? "Citizen journalism," he says, "is like citizen dentistry." Without trained journalists expending the time and resources to find out what is going on, the risk in places such as the United States -- where the news can seem like an endless lunatic carnival in which the outside world doesn’t exist -- is not only of becoming cut off from reality and developing skewed perceptions." CNN needs to realize that broadcasting random tweets helps no one.
- ars 16y agoIt looks like the only way to have good journalism these days is if it's paid out of someones private pocket. People are assuming American news is bad because of some maliciousness, or incompetence, but actually it seems they just don't have the money. Anyone know an American Billionaire who might be willing to start (or fund) a news network? Maybe Warren Buffett?
- frossie 16y agoTed Turner. Oh wait....
- yardie 16y agoAmerican news, internationally, isn't bad. Just the schlock they show in the US is bad. A good American company with good international coverage is CNN International. If you were to watch it you wouldn't believe they share the same name. BTW, CNN International is considered a premium channel that I've only seen carried in major hotels and as a subscription.
- andyjdavis 16y agoI found Al Jazeera was unusual in that after watching it for any length of time I actually felt more knowledgeable for it. In particular their programmes like "Empire" were always educational. Take this for example. http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/empire/2009/11/20091124161117526700.html http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/empire/2009/11/20091... Watching other news stations rarely makes me feel like I've learnt anything. Too many fluff pieces and too many short stories that quickly relay what happened but give you little insight into why. There was a bombing here, there was an accident there, this happened over here, thankyou for watching. Its all reporting and no analysis.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y agoIts all reporting and no analysis You have just NAILED exactly the reason I gave up on cable news years ago and now get most of my news from Public Radio. At least MPR has the decency to point out where they may have a conflict of interest with the stories they report on! It is simply not enough to know that "X" happened. Often, why it happened, and how it can happen again, and what the consequences are is more important than the basic report.
- ivenkys 16y agoAl Jazeera and BBC are by far the top two news organisations in the world. The one common thing they have - independent funding, AJ funded by an oil sheikh and the BBC by the British public. May be that's the way forward , instead of citizen journalism we need citizen funding for news.
- retube 16y agoI absolutely agree. Every country should have an independently/public funded news organisation, that is free from commercial conflicts of interest. AJE is fantastic, by far and away the most rigorous, in depth, detailed and well researched news anywhere. However, the BBC is not what it used to be. Yes it's licence-payer funded, but in recent years the standards of rigour have definitely dropped. There's a lot more emphasis on magazine formats and light-weight simplified coverage catering for the twitter generation.
- davidw 16y agoMany countries in Europe do, and some of them really stink, like RAI in Italy. Because if the government's paying for it, it's ultimately responsible to the government. Which in Italy's case means that not only does Berlusconi control his own TV stations, but those of the government. Oh, and I have to pay something like 100 Euro a year in taxes for the privilege:-/
- ivenkys 16y agoItaly is a complete one-off , the exception that proves the rule i think. Someone like Berlusconi would probably never get elected anywhere else in Western Europe.
- davidw 16y agoAustria elected Haider and his bunch, a while back, who was in his own way worse. I don't think handing over the keys to the TV stations to whoever happens to be in office is necessarily the best way of doing things.
- RK 16y agoI watch Worldfocus sometimes on PBS and they run Al Jazeera English reports all of the time. Edit: Looks like Worldfocus stopped airing as of April 2, 2010.
- simc 16y agoI watch Al Jazeera English sometimes and IMHO it is better than CNN International and nearly as good as BBC World.
- pavs 16y agoA lot of their employees are ex-BBC staff.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Avshalom 16y agoI started watching Al Jazeera a few years back because they were the only news network with a live web broadcast ( http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/# http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/# ) when I didn't have cable. I pretty much fell in love with it for everything the article points out. Great journalism, and journalists every where, actual journalists instead of celebrity talking heads. Debates are two people debating instead of yelling. They also don't have that Fox/CNN approach of going out of their way to portray both sides of every story as equal. The documentaries are top notch too. I wish I had more to add to the article, other than to say that I hope it does make good inroads to NA without changing.
- cdr 16y agoRealPlayer? In 2010? Ick ick ick ick. I'd love to watch, but no.
- carey 16y agoFrom the article, there’s http://www.livestation.com/channels/3-al_jazeera_english_english http://www.livestation.com/channels/3-al_jazeera_english_eng... .
- cdr 16y agoThat's a very low quality stream, and the website doesn't even link to it. The website links to the "premium" version of that provider, which you have to pay for. It looks like they have a lot of technology issues to work out.
- Avshalom 16y agoIt's a free live 24/7 broadcast, with out commercials, of world class journalism, so what if the video quality sucks.
- ericd 16y agoWow, I'm incredibly excited to have AJE potentially coming to the US. I can't stand to watch the news anymore, it's gotten so bad... I always feel like it's a game of spot-the-partisan-bias. Now if only there were a way to help them get picked up by a network...
- jackfoxy 16y ago"After years of sacrificing qualified reporting staff to the bottom line, and substituting public relations (press releases barely rewritten, press conferences reported verbatim) for costly investigative journalism, the media corporations that, starting in the ’90s, convinced regulators that consolidation was essential to their survival have found themselves with little immunity against the financial crisis." Boy does that ever qualify as a run-on sentence! But it does hit a lot of the points of what's gone wrong with journalism. I have noticed media-criticism is a popular past time on HN.
- golwengaud 16y agoNot quite, as there's only one independent clause: "the media corporations [...] have found themselves with little immunity against the financial crisis." But it is an exceedingly complex sentence, with an unusual number of dependent clauses and other things.
- jackfoxy 16y agoYou're right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-on_sentence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-on_sentence
- tokenadult 16y agoIt depends on which circles you run in what is the most hated name in news. Among many people I know, that would be Fox News. For at least some, it would be one of the major United States broadcast networks, e.g. CBS or NBC.
- trafficlight 16y agoI think Fox News is pretty much universal. Nobody can lie like they can.
- dasil003 16y agoAmong journalists, Fox News is without a doubt the most hated because of how they undermine the very concept of journalism. However among government officials, probably Al Jazeera takes the cake because governments prefer Fox's predictability over investigative journalism any day of the week.
- 4chan4ever 16y agoKeep shilling, idiot.
- rdtsc 16y agoFrom the article (quoting Philip Seib): --- Comparing it with the American networks "is like comparing The Economist to Newsweek." --- That's how I see it pretty much. I had accidentally stumbled on Al Jazeera English while channel surfing. Somehow I had always thought they were some shady, terrorist supported news outlet. I very much surprised at the quality of reporting and investigative journalism. They covered issues that actually matter in the world as opposed to "Tiger Woods has been thinking about a public apology" type crap or "Be afraid of killer fungus from outer space that eats your children" type stuff. At the same time I don't know why CNN and other American network report junk. Don't they simply report what American public wants to see and hear? Isn't that a commentary on the quality of American viewers? They are in the business of selling the audience to the advertisers.
- ejames 16y ago> At the same time I don't know why CNN and other American network report junk. Don't they simply report what American public wants to see and hear? Isn't that a commentary on the quality of American viewers? They are in the business of selling the audience to the advertisers. That's the problem journalism is facing - funding. Maybe more fundamentally, the divide between the social value of journalism and the monetary value. I think everyone understands the first part of the problem - without money, a lot of journalism just goes away. You can't afford investigations, foreign bureaus, thorough research, etc. Even simple beat reporting gets worse when there aren't enough beat reporters to go around. What worries me is the relatively unacknowledged second part of the problem: Journalists end up doing MORE of the things that cost less money, or are more profitable, even if they aren't really good journalism. Talking heads, sensationalist stories, reprinted press releases, etc. There's also the more subtle corruption of PR agencies and political operatives that want to "help" journalists "understand" what just happened - even if the journalist is savvy enough to fight back, it still takes time (which is money!) to do that. The less resources the journalist has, the easier they are to manipulate. The social value of journalism is accurate information. But ever since Craigslist punched a hole in the bottom of the classifieds market and let out all the profit, journalists can only make MONEY by getting a lot of eyeballs in a short time. And everyone who's compared Reddit with HN knows what happens when information delivery turns into a short-term popularity contest for the public at large.
- barrkel 16y agoI found this disturbing: "On Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, meanwhile, Sami al-Hajj, a rookie cameraman with the station, was captured in what he believes was a case of mistaken identity (another cameraman named Sami had filmed an interview with bin Laden); he spent six years in Guantánamo before being released in 2008. The forty-year-old Sudanese national, who now walks like an old man, told me he was interrogated more than 300 times -- almost exclusively about Al Jazeera, on whom he was asked to spy."
- puredemo 16y agoAs it should. Some detainees have been held there for over seven years without charges being pressed. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/11/20/guantanamo http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/11/20...
- barrkel 16y agoI just wonder how many spies the CIA / whoever has working in media organizations, i.e. folks who didn't take the hard way out of Guantanamo.