   #copyright

Al Jazeera

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Media; Politics and
government

          "Al Jazeera" is a common Arabic phrase and is used to identify
          geographical locations and other unrelated media outlets. For
          other meanings of Al Jazeera, see Al Jazira.

   CAPTION: Al Jazeera

       Type     Satellite television network
     Country    Flag of Qatar  Qatar
   Availability Worldwide
   Launch date  1996
     Website    www.aljazeera.net (Arabic)
                english.aljazeera.net (English)

   Al Jazeera (Arabic: الجزيرة‎ al-Ǧazīrä), meaning "The Island", is an
   Arabic-language and English language television channel based in Doha,
   Qatar. Its willingness to broadcast dissenting views, including on
   call-in shows, created controversies in the autocratic Persian Gulf
   Arab States. The station gained worldwide attention following the
   September 11, 2001 attacks, when it broadcast video statements by Osama
   bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders (see Videos of Osama bin Laden).

   Al Jazeera operates several specialized television channels in addition
   to its primary news channel. These include Al Jazeera English, an
   English-language channel, Al Jazeera Sports, a popular Arabic-language
   sports channel, Al Jazeera Live, which broadcasts conferences in real
   time without editing or commentary, and the Al Jazeera Children's
   Channel. Future announced products include Al Jazeera Urdu, an Urdu
   language version catering mainly to South Asians, and a channel
   specializing in documentaries. It is also considering possible music
   channels and an international newspaper.

   In addition to its TV channels, Al Jazeera operates Arabic and
   English-language websites.

History

   Al Jazeera claims to be the only politically independent television
   station in the Middle East. It now rivals the BBC in worldwide
   audiences with an estimated 50 million viewers. Al Jazeera was started
   with a US$150 million grant from the emir of Qatar. It aimed to become
   self-sufficient through advertising by 2001, but when this failed to
   occur, the emir agreed to continue subsidizing it on a year-by-year
   basis (US$30 million in 2004, according to Arnaud de Borchgrave). Other
   major sources of income include advertising, cable subscription fees,
   broadcasting deals with other companies, and sale of footage (according
   to Pravda, "Al Jazeera received $20,000 per minute for Bin Laden's
   speech.") In 2000, advertising accounted for 40% of the station's
   revenue.

   The channel began broadcasting in late 1996. In April of that year, BBC
   World Service's Arabic language TV station, faced with censorship
   demands by the Saudi Arabian government, had shut down after two years
   of operation. Many former BBC World Service staff members joined Al
   Jazeera.

   In the beginning, Al Jazeera tried to increase its viewership by means
   of presenting controversial views regarding the governments of many
   Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar;
   Syria's relationship with Lebanon; and the Egyptian judiciary. Its
   well-presented documentary on the Lebanese Civil War in 2000-2001 gave
   its viewer ratings a boost. However, it wasn't until late 2001 that Al
   Jazeera achieved worldwide popularity when it broadcast video
   statements by al-Qaeda leaders.

   In 2003, it poached its first English-language journalist, Afshin
   Rattansi, from the BBC's Today Programme which was at the heart of UK
   events when it came to Tony Blair's decision to back the U.S. invasion
   of Iraq.

   In response to Al Jazeera, a group of Saudi investors created Al
   Arabiya in the first quarter of 2003.

Al Jazeera Channels

    1. Al Jazeera News
    2. Al Jazeera Sport 1
    3. Al Jazeera Sport 2
    4. Al Jazeera Sport 1+
    5. Al Jazeera Sport 2+
    6. Al Jazeera Children
    7. Al Jazeera Docomentries
    8. Al Jazeera International

Al Jazeera outside the Middle East

   On July 4, 2005 Al Jazeera officially announced plans to launch a new
   English-language satellite service called Al Jazeera International. Al
   Jazeera has announced this long-expected move in an attempt to provide
   news about the Arab world, especially Israel, from the Middle Eastern
   perspective. The new channel started November 15, 2006 under the name
   Al Jazeera English and has broadcast centers in Doha (current Al
   Jazeera headquarters and broadcast centre), Athens, Buenos Aires,
   London, Kuala Lumpur and Washington D.C.. The channel is a 24-hour,
   7-day-a-week news channel with 12 hours broadcast from Doha and four
   hours from each of London, Kuala Lumpur, and Washington D.C.

   In September 2005, Josh Rushing joined Al Jazeera International. He was
   the press officer for the United States Central Command during the 2003
   Invasion of Iraq, and in that role was featured in the documentary "
   Control Room." Rushing will be working from the Washington, DC Bureau.
   He commented that "In a time when American media has become so
   nationalized, I'm excited about joining an organization that truly
   wants to be a source of global information..." Former CNN and BBC news
   anchorwoman and award winning journalist Veronica Pedrosa and veteran
   UK broadcaster David Frost have also joined the team, along with Riz
   Khan, a former CNN news anchor who most recently was host of the CNN
   talk show Q&A, CNN producer James Wright, and Kieran Baker, a former
   editor and producer for CNN who most recently was Acting General
   Manager, Communications and Public Participation for ICANN. On 2
   December 2005, Stephen Cole, a senior anchor on BBC World and Click
   Online presenter, announced he was joining Al Jazeera International.
   The network announced on 12 January 2006 that former Nightline
   correspondent Dave Marash would be the co-anchor from their Washington
   studio. He described his new position as "the most interesting job on
   Earth." On 6 February 2006 it was announced that the former BBC
   reporter Rageh Omaar would host a daily weeknights documentary series,
   Witness. With Al Jazeera's growing global outreach and influence, some
   scholars including Adel Iskandar have described the station as a
   transformation of the very definition of "alternative media."

Viewership

   It is widely believed internationally that inhabitants of the Arab
   world are given limited information by their governments and media, and
   that what is conveyed is biased towards the governments' views. Many
   people see Al Jazeera as a more trustworthy source of information than
   government and foreign channels. Some scholars and commentators use the
   notion of contextual objectivity, which highlights the tension between
   objectivity and audience appeal, to describe the station's
   controversial yet popular news approach. As a result, it is probably
   the most watched news channel in the Middle East.

   Increasingly, Al Jazeera's exclusive interviews and other footage are
   being rebroadcast in American, British, and other western media outlets
   such as CNN and the BBC. In January 2003, the BBC announced that it had
   signed an agreement with Al Jazeera for sharing facilities and
   information, including news footage. Al Jazeera is now considered a
   fairly mainstream media network, though more controversial than most.
   In the United States, video footage from the network is largely limited
   to showing video segments of hostages.

   Al Jazeera's programming is available worldwide through various
   satellite and cable systems. In the U.S., it is available through
   subscription satellite TV. Al Jazeera can be freely viewed with a DVB-S
   receiver in Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East as it is
   broadcast on the Astra and Hot Bird satellites. In the UK, it is no
   longer available on Sky as of 29 September 2006

   Al Jazeera's English service started officially at 12h GMT on November
   15, 2006 and is available for North-American viewers on Intelsat
   Americas 5 on the Ku band, transponder 16 (11.999 GHz) in DVB format.
   It transmits on the Sky Digital service on channel 514.

   Al Jazeera's web-based service is accessible subscription-free
   throughout the world, though the English and Arabic sections appear to
   be editorially distinct, with their own selection of news and comment.

Staff

   The Chairman of Al Jazeera is Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer al-Thani, a
   distant cousin of Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.

   Al Jazeera recently restructured its operations and have formed a
   Network that contains all their different channels. Wadah Khanfar, the
   managing director of the Arabic Channel was appointed as the Director
   General of the AlJazeera Network. He also acts as the Managing Director
   of the Arabic channel. He is supported by Ahmed Sheikh,
   Editor-in-Chief, and Amen Jaballah.

   The managing director for Al Jazeera English is Nigel Parsons.

   The Editor-in-Chief of the Arabic website is Abdel Aziz Al Mahmoud, and
   the editorial head is Mohammad Dawood. It has more than one hundred
   editorial staff. The Editor-in-Chief of the English-language site is
   Russell Merryman, who took over in August 2005. He replaced Omar Bec
   who was caretaking the site after the departure of Managing Editor
   Alison Balharry. Previous incumbents include Joanne Tucker and Ahmed
   Sheikh.

   Prominent on-air personalities include Faisal al-Qassem, host of the
   talk show The Opposite Direction.

Criticism and controversy

   An incorrect, but widely reported, criticism is that Al Jazeera has
   shown videos of masked terrorists beheading western hostages. When this
   is reported in reputable media, Al Jazeera presses for retractions to
   be made. This allegation was again repeated by Fox News in the USA on
   the launch day of Al Jazeera's English service, 15 November 2006.

From Algeria

   The Algerian government froze the activities of Al Jazeera's Algerian
   correspondent on July 4, 2004. The official reason given was that a
   reorganization of the work of foreign correspondents was in progress.
   The international pressure group Reporters Without Borders says,
   however, that the measure was really taken in reprisal for a broadcast
   the previous week of a debate on the political situation in Algeria.
   Also, it is alleged that several Algerian cities lost power
   simultaneously to keep residents from watching a program that
   implicated the Algerian military in a series of massacres.

From Bahrain

   Bahrain Information Minister Nabeel Yacoob Al Hamer banned Al Jazeera
   correspondents from reporting from inside the country on 10 May 2002,
   saying that the station was biased towards Israel and against Bahrain.
   After improvements in relations between Bahrain and Qatar in 2004, Al
   Jazeera correspondents returned to Bahrain.

Al Jazeera and Qatar

   Al Jazeera has been critcized for failing to report on many hard
   hitting news stories that originate from Qatar, where Al Jazeera is
   based. The two most frequently critcized stories were the revoking of
   citizenship from the Al Ghafran clan of the Al Murrah tribe in response
   to a failed coup that members of the Al Ghafran clan were implicated
   in, and Qatar's growing relations with and diplomatic visits to Israel.

From Spain

   Reporter Taysir Allouni was arrested in Spain on 5 September 2003, on a
   charge of having provided support for members of al-Qaeda. Judge
   Baltasar Garzón, who had issued the arrest warrant, ordered Allouni
   held indefinitely without bail. He was nevertheless released several
   weeks later for health concerns, but was prohibited from leaving the
   country.

   On 19 September, a Spanish court issued an arrest warrant for Allouni,
   before the expected verdict. Allouni asked the court for permission to
   visit his family in Syria to attend the funeral of his mother, but
   authorities denied his request and ordered him back to jail.

   Although he pleaded not guilty of all the charges against him, Allouni
   was sentenced on 26 September 2005 to seven years in prison for being a
   financial courier for al-Qaeda. Allouni insisted he merely interviewed
   bin Laden after the September 11th attack on the United States.

   Many international and private organizations condemned the arrest and
   called on the Spanish court to free Taysir Allouni. Websites such as
   Free Taysir Allouni and Alony Solidarity were created to support
   Allouni.

From the United States

   In 1999, New York Times reporter Thomas L. Friedman called Al-Jazeera
   "the freest, most widely watched TV network in the Arab world." The
   station first gained widespread attention in the west following the
   September 11, 2001 attacks, when it broadcast videos in which Osama bin
   Laden and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith defended and justified the attacks. This
   led to criticism by the United States government that Al Jazeera was
   engaging in propaganda on behalf of terrorists. Al Jazeera countered
   that it was merely making information available without comment, and
   indeed several western television channels later followed suit in
   broadcasting portions of the tapes.

   On 25 March 2003, two of its reporters covering the New York Stock
   Exchange had their credentials revoked. NYSE spokesman Ray Pellechia
   claimed "security reasons" and that the exchange had decided to give
   access only to networks that focus "on responsible business coverage".
   He denied the revocation has anything to do with the network's Iraq war
   coverage.

From the U.S. government

   While prior to September 11th, 2001, the United States government
   lauded Al Jazeera for its role as an independent media outlet in the
   Middle East, since then US Government spokespersons have often cited
   their belief that Al Jazeera's news coverage has a strong anti-American
   bias. In 2004 the competing Arabic-language satellite TV station Al
   Hurra was launched, funded by the U.S. government.

   On January 30, 2005 the New York Times reported that the Qatari
   government, under pressure from the Bush administration, was speeding
   up plans to sell the station.

   On November 22, 2005, the UK tabloid The Daily Mirror published a story
   claiming that it had obtained a leaked memo from 10 Downing Street
   saying that U.S. President George W. Bush had considered bombing Al
   Jazeera's Doha headquarters in April 2004, when U.S. Marines were
   conducting a contentious assault on Fallujah.

   In light of this allegation, Al Jazeera has questioned whether it has
   been targeted deliberately in the past — Al Jazeera's Kabul office was
   bombed in 2001 and a missile hit its office in Baghdad during the
   invasion of Iraq, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. Both of these
   attacks occurred despite Al Jazeera's provision of the locations of
   their offices to the United States.

   Al Jazeera cameraman Sami Al Hajj was detained while in transit to
   Afghanistan as an " enemy combatant" in December 2001, and is now held
   without charge in Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay.

Al Jazeera and Iraq

   On March 4, 2003, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the New
   York Stock Exchange banned Al Jazeera (as well as several other news
   organizations whose identities were not revealed) from its trading
   floor indefinitely, citing "security concerns" as the official reason.
   The move was quickly mirrored by Nasdaq stock market officials.

   During the Iraq war, Al Jazeera faced the same reporting and movement
   restrictions as other news-gathering organizations. In addition, one of
   its reporters, Tayseer Allouni, was banned from the country by the
   Iraqi Information Ministry, while another one, Diyar Al-Omari, was
   banned from reporting in Iraq (both decisions were later retracted). On
   April 3, 2003, Al Jazeera withdrew its journalists from the country,
   citing unreasonable interference from Iraqi officials.

   Also in the run-up to the war the U.S. Pentagon hired the Rendon Group
   to target and possibly punish Al Jazeera reporters who did not stay on
   message.

   On April 8, 2003 Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad was attacked by U.S.
   forces, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub and wounding another, despite the
   U.S. being informed of the office's precise coordinates prior to the
   incident. Similarly, on November 13, 2001 the U.S. launched a missile
   attack on Al Jazeera's office in Kabul during the U.S. invasion of
   Afghanistan, also after being informed of its location. Al Jazeera
   cameraman Sami Al-Haj, a Sudanese national, has also been held by U.S.
   forces since the start of 2002 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On 23 November
   2005, Sami Al-Haj's lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith reported that, during
   (125 of 130) interviews, U.S. officials had questioned Sami as to
   whether Al Jazeera was a front for al-Qaeda. The reasons for his
   detention remain unknown, although the U.S. official statements on
   detainees is that they are security threats.

   In May 2003, the CIA, through the Iraqi National Congress, released
   documents purportedly showing that Al Jazeera had been infiltrated by
   Iraqi spies, and was regarded by Iraqi officials as part of their
   propaganda effort. As reported by the Sunday Times, the alleged spies
   were described by an Al Jazeera executive as having minor roles with no
   input on editorial decisions.

   On 23 September 2003, Iraq suspended Al Jazeera (and Al-Arabiya) from
   reporting on official government activities for two weeks for what the
   Council stated as supporting recent attacks on council members and
   Coalition occupational forces. The move came after allegations by
   Iraqis who stated that the channel had incited anti-occupation violence
   (by airing statements from Iraqi resistance leaders), increasing ethnic
   and sectarian tensions, and being supportive of the resistance.

   During 2004, Al Jazeera broadcast several video tapes of various
   kidnapping victims which had been sent to the network. The videos were
   filmed by the groups after kidnapping a hostage. The hostages are
   shown, often blindfolded, pleading for their release. They often appear
   to be forced to read out prepared statements of their kidnappers. Al
   Jazeera has assisted authorities from the home countries of the victims
   in an attempt to secure the release of kidnapping victims. This
   included broadcasting pleas from family members and government
   officials. Contrary to some allegations, including the oft-reported
   comments of Donald Rumsfeld on June 4, 2005, Al Jazeera has never shown
   beheadings which often appear on internet websites.

   On August 7, 2004, the Iraqi Allawi government shut down the Iraq
   office of Al Jazeera, claiming that it was responsible for presenting a
   negative image of Iraq, and charging the network with fueling
   anti-Coalition hostilities. Al Jazeera vowed to continue its reporting
   from inside Iraq. News photographs showed United States and Iraqi
   military personnel working together to close the office. Initially
   closed by a one-month ban, the shutdown was extended indefinitely in
   September 2004, and the offices sealed.

On the Internet

Arabic language

   The Arabic version of the site was brought offline for about 10 hours
   by an FBI raid on its ISP, InfoCom Corporation, on September 5, 2001.
   InfoCom was later convicted of exporting to Libya and Syria, of
   knowingly being invested in by a Hamas member (both of which are
   illegal in the United States), and of underpaying customs duties.

English language

   The station launched an English-language edition of its online content
   in March, 2003. English broadcasts via satellite began in November
   2006.

Hacker attacks

   Immediately after its launch, the site was attacked by hackers, who
   launched denial-of-service attacks and redirected visitors to a site
   featuring an American flag. In November, 2003, John William Racine II,
   also known as 'John Buffo', was sentenced to 1000 hours of community
   service and a $2000 U.S. fine for the online disruption. Racine posed
   as an Al Jazeera employee to get a password to the network's site, then
   redirected visitors to a page he created that showed an American flag
   shaped like a U.S. map and a patriotic motto, court documents said. In
   June 2003, Racine pleaded guilty to wire fraud and unlawful
   interception of an electronic communication.

Provider

   The site was forced to change internet hosting providers several times,
   due, in its opinion, to political pressure. Initially its
   English-language site was provided by the U.S.-based DataPipe, which
   gave it notice, soon followed by Akamai Technologies. They later
   shifted to the French branch of NavLink, and then to (and currently)
   AT&T WorldNet Services.

Documentaries

   Al Jazeera's coverage of the invasion of Iraq was the focus of an
   award-winning 2004 documentary film, Control Room by Egyptian-American
   director Jehane Noujaim. In July 2003, PBS broadcast a documentary,
   called "Exclusive to al-Jazeera" on its program " Wide Angle." Another
   documentary, Al-Jazeera, An Arab Voice for Freedom or Demagoguery? The
   UNC Tour was filmed two months after the September 11, 2001 Terrorist
   Attack.

Awards

     * In November 2005, Al Jazeera was awarded by Index on Censorship for
       its "courage in circumventing censorship and contributing to the
       free exchange of information in the Arab world."
     * In April 2004, Webby Awards nominated Al Jazeera as one of the five
       best news Web sites, along with BBC News, National Geographic,
       RocketNews and The Smoking Gun. According to Tifanny Schlain, the
       founder of the Webby Awards, this caused a controversy as [other
       media organisations] "felt it was a risk-taking site,".
     * In December 1999, Ibn Rushd (Averoes) Fund for Freedom of Thought
       in Berlin awarded the "Ibn Rushd Award" for media and journalism
       for the year to Al Jazeera.
     * In 2004, Al Jazeera was voted by brandchannel.com readers as the
       fifth most influential global brand behind Apple Computer, Google,
       Ikea and Starbucks.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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