The Demand to "Close" Al Jazeera Harms Press Freedom
Picture: taken from Doha Office of Al Jazeera, credits due to Al Jazeera & Wikipedia user Wittylama
By Will Youmans/Arab America Contributing Writer
When Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt launched a blockade and issued a list of thirteen demands to Qatar that included the closure of Al Jazeera and other news media outlets, it was the culmination of the past two decades of their concerted efforts to silence its brand of critical journalism. They condemn it as highly partisan and supportive of dissident political movements threatening to de-stabilize the region. Their animus against the media network, as with their own domestic journalism, is rooted in a long tradition of opposition to press freedom. They believe news media should serve out their regimes’ political objectives.
The split with Saudi Arabia, in particular, is embedded in the network’s origins. Al Jazeera was born out of a failed Saudi media venture with the BBC. The project was nixed over the issue of editorial independence, which the BBC wanted and Saudi refused. This casts a long shadow over the crisis today. Al Jazeera’s first workforce was that failed project’s pool of unemployed, BBC-trained TV news workers and reporters.
There was another original reason Al Jazeera is central to today’s crisis. Saudi Arabia has sought to discipline Qatari foreign policy since the 1995 coup in which Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani deposed his father. The old Emir was largely servile to the larger neighbor. The new Emir desired to steer a fresh course for Qatar and to move outside of the Saudi sphere of control. He launched Al Jazeera to give Qatar its own media presence against the Saudi-dominated regional media that took cues from the government and heavily criticized the coup. The network’s chairman Sheikh Hamad bin Thamir Al Thani explained that the network asserted Qatar as “an important part of the greater Arabian peninsula.”
In its early days, Al Jazeera famously alienated all of the region’s governments with its featuring of debates and diverse views, a first for Arab regional news television. The channel aired dissidents who were effectively shut out of legacy media. This included rarely heard Saudi and Egyptian opposition activists.
The countries standing with Saudi Arabia have long wanted to behead Al Jazeera in the public square. In the early 2000s, when Al Jazeera’s Arabic language news channel was at its peak, making a name for itself as a source of critical, ground-breaking journalism for its coverage of the Afghanistan invasion, the GCC announced a boycott of the channel’s advertisers.
As Brian Whitaker wrote, one of the leaked State department cables indicated that in 2001, the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed — the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and one of the top officials presiding over the UAE’s armed forces — requested that the US government bomb the network.
Western governments also took sharp exception to Al Jazeera’s war reporting since it undermined their control of the narrative and turned public opinion against them. Years after Mohammed bin Zayed’s suggestion, President George W. Bush separately floated as much to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as minutes of their meeting documented. The leaders dismissed news reports saying it was made in jest. The network did not find it funny since American military forces did previously strike its Kabul and Baghdad bureaus, killing and injuring Al Jazeera personnel.
Nearly every Arab country has formally punished Al Jazeera in some way. Countries have banned or blocked Al Jazeera’s transmissions and/or arrested and detained Al Jazeera staff.
Al Jazeera’s Arabic reporting is rightfully subject to criticism for its biases and partisanship. It is in need of deep reforms to return to a more vigorous independence and a commitment to more balanced reporting. Even without considering that the network offers high quality journalism on its English and AJ+ services, the demand by these enemies of press freedom to close down the entire network is clearly objectionable.
In response to the latest action, the most dramatic threat to the network’s existence yet, an array of leaders in the news world, such as The New York Times and The Guardian, have spoken out against the attempt to shutter Al Jazeera.
Freedom of press advocates such as the Committee to Press Journalists condemned the threat and demanded that the “countries involved in this dispute to stop holding media hostage.” Pluralism in news media is a value in and of itself. The bloc of countries’ vision that news media should serve out their political goals will only doom the region further to narrow thought and conflict.
That the blockade and anti-press demands appear to have President Donald Trump’s approval can hardly be a surprise. We’ve seen his own hostility to news media play out week after week.
-William Youmans is the author of the recently published An Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera’s Struggle in America.