Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April | Hacker News Reader

Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

nytimes.com

382 pointscoloneltcb290 comments

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html

I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success dependent on the existing way of doing content business in the US (cable channels), but the number of cord cutters keeps increasing, the most valuable segment for advertisers (younger folk) are the most likely cord cutters (or cord nevers), and the cable business depends heavily on bundling. For example Disney owns ESPN (most of it), so they can make the cable companies to take a portfolio of channels, or get none of them. Al Jazeera had no such leverage.

Their business model was a big gamble, based on the past, and didn't work.

This. Moving away from service chord cutters at this point was just odd. Embracing alternative media has done wonders for outlets like Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison).

> Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison)

Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. However, I agree with you that it's not a good comparision. BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy.

RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.

Same with the Australian ABC. Pretty much only rusted on supporters of the Liberal and National parties are the only ones who don't support it, and even they watch it over the commerical networks.

That said, I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle.

Although it's becoming less meaningful statistic due to a host of reasons the audience figures for free-to-air (FTA) TV have almost always had the ABC trailing the smallest commercial network. A 2009 graph[0] shows how it's historically been although digging into more recent numbers their position is slightly better with the new digital channels.[1] Although we are in the holiday season and the commercial channels seem to perform better in other portions of the year.

[0] https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archf...

[1] (~467k pdf) http://oztam.com.au//documents/2015/OzTAM-20151227-C1MetFTAS...

> I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle.

I don't see this as a good fit for Netflix as I'm not quite sure what they would bring to the news cycle table that isn't already being done. Commercial free broadcasts? Infrastructure? Most quality, public media stations already upload full, commercial free shows to their Youtube channels (and often with quick turn-around from the original broadcast date.) You just simply need to subscribe to their channel (something that I can't do in Netflix).

Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather.

Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other sources to corroborate.

You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.

Well I mean I can't say anything to Russia Today but Al Jazeera for instance is often the only english language network with reporters on the ground in a lot of middle east situations.

This. It can be hard to get a non-US spin on middle eastern events, which is I regularly look to AJ and BBC. The value is in getting a different perspective, not completely unbiased reporting. Associated Press feeds can also be somewhat helpful: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds

Yep. There's whole different point of views to be seen. People are saying propaganda like it means only the caricaturization of propaganda(i.e.: overt), and, corollarily, like what is not overt is not propaganda or like it's "but ours is nicer/good". It's not like this, propaganda is everywhere. To me, anything that's not the pure facts plus context is the same as propaganda/ideology, there's only reality or propaganda/ideology, it's what I'm saying. If you want to approximate reality of stuff getting the different perspectives is absolutely mandatory. I guess that's too much work for most people, though.

Yes, and even when you are publishing pure facts, which is a good goal for journalists, there is still some editorial in which of many facts you choose to publish.

I agree, getting multiple perspectives on an issue can be extremely time-consuming and challenging. This site shares three different perspectives on current events in one place: http://pxw.news/whos-to-blame-for-the-iran-saudi-dispute/

Thats really interesting, thanks! I'll be following this one :)

Right, but if you take the union of sources you see more new stories total.

In order to do critical thinking on a subject, you first need to know that it exists. Alternate sources can be helpful with being alerted to stuff.

Although with Russia Today, it takes a pretty large effort to filter out the information from between the propaganda. Al Jazeera on the other hand has a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio.

Being able to approach things from many perspectives (even if those perspectives are highly biased, because there does not exist an unbiased perspective in human-gathered news) is very important.

I agree, but getting multiple perspectives on an issue can be extremely time-consuming and challenging. This site shares three different perspectives on current events in one place: http://pxw.news/whos-to-blame-for-the-iran-saudi-dispute/

Ever heard of "there's always three sides to every story"?

Apart from what the others replied(those networks will show stuff that isn't 'interesting' for some demographic), having the 'your' and 'mine' sides of the story is pretty much necessary to approximate the 'true' side.

> RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.

So like NBC nightly news? The US is full of what can only be described as US government propaganda, 60 minutes is a prime example. CBS and NBC are no better than RT unfortunately, they just often tell Americans what they want to hear so nobody bats an eyelid.

AJ and BBC have their biases but at least they try.

PS - I moved to the US from abroad and was genuinely shocked not by the obviously ridiculous cable news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) but by the "news" pretending to be unbiased while in reality being a US government mouthpiece.

I don't know a good way to prove that US media is not a government mouthpiece, but I don't think there is much evidence to support such a strong claim, whereas it is pretty easy to argue that RT is a government mouthpiece. EG:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-to...

Just to be clear I never said RT wasn't a government mouthpiece. I said that some US news is "as bad as" them.

I have no idea how exactly it works with CBS/NBC/60 minutes. Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.

I don't think we are watching the same news at all. CBS and NBC regularly have reports that the government would stop if they could.

>I said that some US news is "as bad as" them.

I've seen plenty of reports on NBC or CBS criticizing Obama (or Bush before him), have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT?

How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?

> have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT?

Yes.

Additionally I didn't say Obama was running anything, I was more thinking the DoD. They likely fund, produce, or have produced specific bottled segments.

Which isn't to say they have direct editorial control, just that propaganda is a common sight on US TVs.

Plus I can back up what I am saying, here's a program from 2002:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_prog...

So from 2002 to 2008 I can prove that this occurred. But since then it has definitely continued, I'm sure they renamed it, and retooled it, and involved more private entities to act as legal buffs, but it definitely still goes on to this day.

> How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?

I don't understand the question.

The US isn't run by an autocracy so there are competing interests in the government. It doesn't make sense to claim they are being controlled by the government, because they wouldn't agree with each other on what should be said. That said, there's definitely an implicit bias that America is right and North Korea/Iran/Russia etc are wrong but that's a nationwide problem, hardly evidence of some mass conspiracy.

You're replying to a comment that links to an article on the domestic PsyOps program run by the DoD, officially, since shortly after 9/11. The issue is not that people are patriotic. It is not even that political dissent is not tolerated in mainstream media. It is that propaganda pieces, manufactured with the expressed purpose to manipulate the electorate, are broadcast.

It's not like there is a party line on everything. You are allowed to have differing opinions on benign issues, such as cooking, celebrities, or football.

There is a saying.. We in the USA have one party, the Business Party, with two right wings.

The Democrat-Republican spectrum spans the spectrum of opinion that is fundable by the business community. There is plenty of vigorous debate within that spectrum. But money wins elections and funds advertising-dependent media, so that's how non business friendly perspectives get filtered out.

It's not a conspiracy, it's more "unnatural selection" by money in the media and political systems.

The working class press of a century ago had a much broader spectrum of opinion, for example. But it didn't rely on advertising.

If money wins elections, can you explain why Jeb Bush isn't polling first in the Republican primary process right now? Can you also explain why Bernie Sanders is within single digits of Clinton nationally, and beating her in Iowa and New Hampshire? You'd expect that the candidates who spend the most (and represent the monied establishment) would do the best, right? Is it possible that there are other forces at play (for instance, popular opinion?)

Those are not election wins. We are not even close to the peak of the election cycle where the real money gets spent. There certainly are more forces at play, but money plays the key role.

>There certainly are more forces at play, but money plays the key role.

I don't think money is close to playing the key role. If that were true it would only take a few billion to buy a presidential election.

Money is definitely necessary, but I don't think it's sufficient.

Removed old comment, replaced it with this one:

Here, read this: http://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-are-both-politica...

> "I've seen plenty of reports on NBC or CBS criticizing Obama (or Bush before him), have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT?"

Here you go:

http://youtu.be/ZolXrjGIBJs

And immediately after she said that RT executives issued statements saying that she was "misled by the American media" and that

“In her comment Ms. Martin also noted that she does not possess a deep knowledge of reality of the situation in Crimea."

RT then used this one piece of dissent against the normal pro Russia coverage of Crimea to parade around as example of their openness.

You'll also notice that less than a year after saying that she was off the network.

> "You'll also notice that less than a year after saying that she was off the network."

Fair point, but I wouldn't say the US networks were much better...

http://youtu.be/ozxzNjRqCiE

http://youtu.be/HrKKkGl3TnY

> Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.

They often attack and upset the government, including leaking government secrets and sometimes getting prosecuted for it. I don't think it's at all comparable. Is Fox a mouthpiece for Obama? Was MSNBC a mouthpiece for Bush? The NY Times, to its credit, is criticized by all sides a being on the 'other' side.

When was the last time NBC, CNN, Fox, or CBS leaked government secrets?

There's pretty good evidence that lots of American media outlets are government mouthpieces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent for example

That book argues that mass media are biased because they are beholden to for-profit corporations, advertisers, and large-entity sourcing. I didn't read it, that's just in the outline that's in the link you provided.

I think Noam would prefer if they were government mouthpieces instead of corporate mouthpieces, as he's socialist.

Regardless, I don't think "Noam Chomsky wrote a book" is an argument with evidence. It's rather an appeal to authority. But if it were, the book should actually be about the argument you're making.

The book is about the argument. One example from the book is the 1984 Nicaraguan general election (Wikipedia notes this), where US media sources took the White House press secretary's words as gospel, ignoring the atrocities on the ground.

Also, thinking that socialists are willing to blindly trust government sources is pretty wrong as well. Far left and far right both share a distrust of the state.

US mass media exhibit both government bias and corporate bias. And it can be hard to distinguish them, because US government is also subject to strong corporate bias. That was very much so during the Regan and Bush years. The Democrats are more subtle, and reflect a power base that's far more covert.

Suggestion: try reading on stuff you want to critique before commenting about them instead spouting malformed ideas that you patched up from internet comments, Facebook posts and other distortion prone medium. People who do read up on stuff can clearly see you don't know what you're talking about.

Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have done excellent comparative research demonstrating exactly that in great detail. For example by comparing coverage of events by the U.S. and its allies to similar events by enemies, finding consistent and strong bias in the mainstream media.

They also develop a theory, more of an explanation, that this is essentially because mainstream media is funded through advertising which then naturally biases it towards the interests of the business elite. That is how we get thought control in a democratic society.

See Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions for numerous cases. Wonderful books. See also Alex Carey's work on corporate propaganda, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.

Not directly -- but the networks depend on the government to give them all-important access to events (press conferences, interviews, etc). Report something the government doesn't like? Next time, you'll be the one that's shut out from the next White House press briefing.

The news media in the US isn't a "government mouthpiece", but there is definitely East Coast government-media-academia axis which considers itself "elite" and has common goals. To have the wrong opinions is bad for your career.

It's not so much that the news is a government mouthpiece, more that each network tends to report the news in a fashion that supports its political views: CNN, MSNBC, and the traditional alphabet networks on the left, Fox News on the right. (And, of course, these are American definitions of left and right, so feel free to map them to your nation of origin however you please.) If the network is simpatico to the party in power, they'll sound like government propagandists. If not, RT or Al-Jazeera will have nothing on how venomous they get.

To put it another way, imagine the Guardian vs. the Daily Mail, but on television instead. No one, I hope, would pick up a copy of those newspapers expecting the unbiased facts; same deal here.

> CNN, MSNBC, and the traditional alphabet networks on the left

An important point, I think: The propagandists, most prominently today the News Corp outlets such as Fox and the WSJ, want to portray the whole world as ideologically driven. It innoculates their followers against anything anyone else can say (e.g., 'it's all left-wing propaganda, don't even bother') and justifies their own propaganda.

But everyone is not ideological. MSNBC is, at least it was the little I saw of them awhile ago, maybe NPR is, but I disagree that the rest are on the left. They are mostly straight-ahead journalism without significant ideology (though of course nothing is perfect in the world, and I'm omitting the unconcious ideology of the US popular perspective that people like Chomsky observe.)

Eh, for one thing, ideology in journalism can be just as much what you choose to report on as how you report on it. You could find right-wingers who will complain at you all day about how CNN/NBC/whoever spend virtually no time reporting on things which make the current Administration look bad and lots of time reporting on things which make their opponents look bad, and it'll be hard to say they're wrong.

I doubt it's possible for the news to be truly non-ideological for this, and many other, reasons. The best one can hope for is a news organization that is a) straightforward and open about its political viewpoint and b) reports in a sober and accurate manner with a minimum of flinging partisan red meat around. There are a fair number of American news sources that are a), but b) is much harder to come by, especially on television. Given this, I can understand why some Americans flock to the BBC or Al Jazeera or whoever, even if I personally despise their editorial positions.

> "I doubt it's possible for the news to be truly non-ideological for this, and many other, reasons."

It's more straightforward than you might think, you just have to give airtime to conflicting views, and make sure discussion of news stories are conducted respectfully.

I understand what you're saying about it being possible to show bias just by what news stories you choose to cover, but inviting on dissenting voices helps tackle that issue. If you expect intelligent debate from your news sources, you'll spot it when it's absent.

No, not like NBC or anything else you mention.

One is backed by the government and runs propaganda. The other is more pro-US than you like, but can and will be very critical of government officials and practices.

What is propaganda about NBA nightly news or 60 minutes, something that isn't better explained by those shows catering to the values and preconceptions of their viewers?

Remember, there's a special name for the type of reporting journalists do when they aren't just copying & pasting government and corporate press releases in their news stories: "investigative journalism."

Anything else is just reporting publicly-available information from some official source.

Notice that that's also the first line item to get slashed when budget-cuttin' time rolls around.

Perhaps there is a happy middle which doesn't cost an arm and a leg to produce a report, and still isn't straight-up propaganda. It's called reporting publicly-available information from multiple credible sources, and not reporting single-sourced PR releases. Also known as "journalism". I heard somewhere that it was essential to the nature of a free state.

The Al Jazeera that we get in the UK is apparently run by a lot of ex-BBC people, and uses a lot of the BBC house style, which means and news report will instantly look respectable to a big British market segment. Not that I've ever met anyone in the UK who's ever watched it, of course.

This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

BBC is not considered trustworthy in India. We listen to BBC for English language but also recognize that BBC still suffers from colonial-era mindset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hind...

"Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyses the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist stance.[118]"

The BBC is not seen as a trustworthy news source by all in the UK either, but its biases are harder to spot than some other outlets. Generally speaking, you only get a clear picture of their news manipulation when you're on the opposing side of the messages they put out.

To give a recent example, there was a story a week or two ago where they held back on an interview with a politician they knew was going to resign until just before a parliamentary debate, which appears to have been a move to undermine the leader of this politician's party, which they've been making efforts to discredit.

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=81049649

Although there is no such thing as complete objectivity in news reporting, the BBC news department tends to try to give all political parties an equally hard time, with the possible exception of extreme right parties like UKIP, who they are a little harder on.

Thats odd, I distinctly remember a huge liking and trust for the BBC (especially radio) among the older Indian folk - middle class and above.

I think it's more accurate to say that the BBC is disliked by the newer Hindu nationalist types for not pandering to their world view.

I think it's more accurate to say that the BBC is disliked by lots of people are aren't culturally Marxist.

BBC is fine for left-leaning Anglosphere types, but it's not very broad in terms of the views covered.

"culturally Marxist" sounds like a right-wing way of saying "not Marxist." It makes about as much sense as being "culturally vegetarian."

"Cultural Marxism" is a shibboleth used in far-right white nationalist circles to mean "not racist". It's typically paired with claims that "cultural Marxism" is a "Jewish plot" to cause "white genocide".

If you see anyone use it unironically, run away.

Sorry, but you're not going to be able to tag somebody like me with the alt-right label. I'm none of those things. The point is that the BBC isn't only disliked by Indian nationalists. That's what I was responding to.

And actually, that's not what Marxism is or means at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

When you use the word cultural marxist you're outing yourself as a right-extremist conspiracy theorist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...

That's actually not the meaning I was using. It's pretty obvious that BBC is not centrist in content.

BBC is not considered trustworthy by lots of people in the West, too. They're very left-biased, and very poor at presenting opposing viewpoints.

... and most of the left wing considers BBC right-biased.

Do you have anything to back this up? To me, they are biased to the establishment/center right, which seems borne out by at least one study:

http://www.newstatesman.com/broadcast/2013/08/hard-evidence-...

You can question BBC on Impartiality & Diversity of Opinion http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/...

> BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy.

Brit here: The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. The news team (IMHO) generally takes an editorial view that is to the left of the current Tory government. For once I think the BBC is to the right of the current Labour opposition, whose new leadership is the furthest left it has been for a generation. And perhaps worryingly non-electable to people who are mildly left-of-centre.

My current approach to getting the UK news is to interpolate between the Guardian (pro-Labour, but less so of its current leadership) and the Telegraph (Torygraph).

> "worryingly non-electable"

I find it baffling that people still believe this rhetoric, especially after Corbyn winning the Labour leadership election by a huge margin. The whole 'unelectable' thing certainly gets repeated enough in the media, but I'd hoped more people would've seen through the concerted effort to attack him by now.

Yes. The BBC isn't pro-govt but it isn't neutral either. IMO

> The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven.

It's amazing how many people don't understand this fact. You'll see people on reddit compare the BBC to RussiaToday or Xinhua. The latter two are literally government run agencies that specifically exist to push their country's narrative of world events out to the rest of the world. The BBC is government owned but not government ran, there's a massive difference.

If Western media could not stop the WMD lie, what are they good for? You can find BBC fabrication in faked Madaya media images [1], or see bad stage acting used in BBC Panorama 'Saving Syria's Children.' [2]

[1] https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-...

[2] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/

_______ is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi (INSERT TOP NEWS NETWORK HERE)

> considered to be trustworthy

By who, please, people who don't watch the BBC? The BBC has been in opposition to the UK government once in living memory, back in 2003, and it's still being talked about.

none of the news channels is trustworthy. the difference is in degree of bias. BBC is very biased.

The BBC is not very objective in its coverage of Israel. http://bbcwatch.org is very critical of the BBC in this respect.

Al Jazeera seems to have a problem with Jews in general ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and... says so ). They also don't like the Shia - not without editorial bias so to speak.

I can personally attest to the impact of this change. I used to watch their English language coverage, but have not done so since the launch of their cable channel. If this decision means I can stream the international feed from the US again, I won't complain.

It's actually still possible to stream their international feed (AJE) from the US. I'd rather not post how here out of fear something will be changed and it won't work any more, but if you send me an email or reply with some way to send you a couple lines of text I'll set you up.

It's stupid easy, streams straight to VLC.

Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? Those folks sticking with cable are probably older, more traditional people - do they regard Al Jazeera as legitimate news source or is it "that terrorist news channel" in their eyes? Honest question, I've always enjoyed Al Jazeera, but as a european I don't know if they are mainstream enough to succeed in US cable networks.

> Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience?

I think it was purely a business decision. The way the US cable model works is the content providers get however many cents a month per subscriber that has the channel. The individual amount isn't great, but the cable company does all the hard work of collecting the money and giving you a single nice bigger cheque.

It also helps with advertising, because they can now give aggregate demographic information to their advertisers such as income levels, locations, and others based on correlation (eg age). Advertisers really don't want to pay for non-target users. For example if targeting women in their 30s, they aren't going to pay for ads going to males in their 60s. The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information, especially if you don't already have it (eg Google and especially Facebook do). This can be somewhat addressed by requiring accounts to view, but that is a big burden for getting new viewers (who wants a new account to view something you have never seen before?)

Ben Thompson of Stratechery (good site and reporting BTW) has a nice overiew article on the US cable tv ecosystem: https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-t...

>The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information

Is this a problem in 2016? I'm pretty sure you can get _MORE_ data from internet tracking vs. otherwise.

The cable channel only decision was made in 2013. In 2016 they could just shut down Al Jazeera America, and stream the main channel. (It looks like that is what will happen.)

You do get data from internet tracking, but it is based around your activity and some correlation (eg geoip). Note that Al Jazeera would only get information about their own activity. There are various services that aggregate at a higher level, but they do cost money. I can't find any now, but there were a few companies that had a service you could ask about the current user and they would return likely demographic information.

That all matters if you are trying to sell the advertising yourself. If someone else higher in the user visibility chain sells the ads (eg google, facebook, yahoo) then they already have the comprehensive tracking and demographics. But advertising isn't that profitable and those guys will take a big chunk of the revenue, while you remain beholden to them.

I did wonder if perhaps its name and anti-Arabic prejudice held held it back. It would be a shame if it did, because Al Jazeera seemed like a remarkably sane and thoughtful voice in the otherwise short-sighted and highly partial media landscape of the US.

Yes, that's what I meant - I remember it was an issue when they started to gain traction in the US market. For someone not familiar with them, Al Jazeera likely doesn't sound a like a legitimate news source. I wondered if that's still the case. Persoannly, I found their reports to be excellent in many cases.

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next.

That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking Dead that have community reactions as episodes air.

The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.

When you break down the technology, that won't change anytime soon either.

With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

Netflix already has local boxes on ISP networks that act as a local cache for customers on that network to ease the load on the ISP's peering connections. A similar architecture could handle that fanout for live content as well.

For $20/month you can get ESPN & ESPN2 and about 20 other channels (Food Network, HGTV, Cartoon Network, Discovery, History Channel are a few of the main ones I use) streamed via Sling TV. For another $5 you can add a few more Sports channels.

Serious question: can I record streams from Sling TV so I can watch on my schedule and skip commercials?

There's no way to skip commercials or record shows. Sling does offer an interesting alternative: each channel is accompanied by an on-demand section of recent broadcasts, meaning you wouldn't need to record anything because it'd already be available for streaming. Sadly, support for this is inconsistent between channels.

I signed up for Sling TV over the summer to help get me through long sleepless nights with a newborn. It's an interesting service but there are lots of little problems like the above. I dropped it around Thanksgiving.

I was on their beta and still have it today. I don't watch it a lot, and only really use it for ESPN and background noise.

But every time I'm about to cancel, there's a big matchup on ESPN that makes me say "just one more month". And then since I have it I throw it on as background noise again. It's a vicious cycle.

It's only a complication for the last mile, and I think it can cope. For the backbone, they can just do poor man's multicast with their appliances for ISPs. Just one stream to each ISP/appliance, which is then repeated to each client.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/

> The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.

During college football season I got a Sling subscription solely to watch college football (ESPN and the SEC Network mostly). I never even really used the Sling app much - it's terrible, crashes a lot, and isn't on AppleTV. I just used my Sling account to connect to WatchESPN. That, plus an antenna for the marquee matchups on the major networks covered everything I wanted to see this last year at 1/6 the cost of a cable subscription.

All of my football-watching friends were doing the same thing this year.

The fact is, if I could, I would pay ESPN directly what I paid Sling for access to WatchESPN. Because, just like cable, Sling was giving me a bunch of stuff I don't really care about just to get ESPN. There's nothing else on TV that I can't wait for other than sports.

> With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

I really don't think the problem here is technological so much as it is economic. The scalability problems could be solved if there was the will. But according to one article [0] an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts. Considering ESPN is starting to feel the crunch [1] from cord cutting and is beginning to trim costs, I imagine it will eventually become a reality.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2015/03/25/are-...

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-television-espn-househo...

>isn't on AppleTV

You can use your Sling membership credentials to sign into ESPN's app. The app does not crash from my experience - works a charm.

Yup, that's exactly what I was doing. :)

Doesn't it air on any open channel?

when i got my friends to watch the world cup at home i attached a $5 antenna to the DVR (i build a computer with a $120 TV-in card, and had never used until then!)

the image was not the best, but for live sports, who cares?! oh and it got worse every time a plane passed above.

anyway, the antenna was a very easy solution for the impromptu need for live sports.

Not sure where you're located, but in the US ESPN is a cable/satellite only channel. The only way to get it is with a subscription.

For college sports, they're also the biggest player. The "big" matchups of the week (usually the highest ranked or most interesting teams) in each market are usually played on the major networks that you can pick up with an antenna from the local affiliate. But the rest of the games being televised are carried exclusively* on cable, usually on ESPN channels.

Keep in mind there are 128 Division 1-A (major) programs, and many more 1-AA and lower programs, so there are a LOT of games going on each week. Some games are played during the week, but the very large majority of them are played on Saturday. So there's way more going on then could ever conceivably be carried over the air.

During college football season, there are something like 7 or 8 games playing simultaneously on the various ESPN channels, not including the "Plus" channels that are only available digitally by WatchESPN.

There are a couple others out there (NBC Sports Network and FoxSports come to mind) but neither are bigger in sports than ESPN.

* Depending on where you live, you can also sometimes get radio broadcasts if you live close enough to the school in question that there's a local affiliate that carries the game. Rights for those are handled differently.

i see. well, for air channels, they would probably show the Saturday game with the most local teams only. never really followed american football. but for soccer that works fine for most people. And when there are two games with local teams, they show the bigger one and interrupt it to show goals on the other one.

> an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts.

ESPN and professional sports are way over valued and forcing everyone to subsidize sports fans. This is literally the reason why people are becoming cord-cutters, they're tired of paying for things they don't want. Right now 1 in 6 cable subscribers watch ESPN but 6 in 6 cable subscribers pay for it. Cable companies really need to move to an a-la-carte pricing model if they want survive but they're afraid of the large networks pulling their bundles. It's almost like we need a cable monopoly or union to break the network monopolies.

"1 in 6 watches it, 6 in 6 pay for it".

Except that the marginal cost of providing ESPN service to people who do not watch ESPN is nearly zero.

A-la-carte pricing makes sense if the corporation is spending a-la-carte costs, but they're not: the cable hookup and maintenance costs almost the same either way. There are some issues with a cap on the number of channels that can be simultaneously transmitted in a cable pipe, but it's perfectly feasible to launch a few hundred simulcast channels on current tech. You're not paying for the stuff you don't watch, you're paying for what you do watch; Providing the selection of things that you can refuse to watch, is basically free.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Except" or "You're not paying for the stuff you don't watch, you're paying for what you do watch;"

A la carte that avoids ESPN, doesn't exist from the major providers (it's part of everyone's basic packages but ATT that I have seen). That was the point (6 of 6 pay for it).

The cost of the hookup is just one part of the cost. Licensing fees are also present. A quick Google search finds that for ESPN, these are on the order of $5/customer/month. For someone who doesn't watch ESPN, that is a hefty subsidy compared to that of other networks.

Source:http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/dish-espn-trial-off...

Simple_Example_Cable_Company has 200k subscribers, charges $30/month, and licenses:

$10/customer/month to Channel A, which has 100k viewers who only watch it

$10/customer/month to Channel B, which also has 100k viewers who only watch it

...

In 2018, consumer activists manage to break up SECC and institute an a-la-carte system.

In 2019 they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel A (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month), or they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel B (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month).

On top of that, to secure either channel you're going to need a $10 subscription fee to the service provider for hookup (which is going to charge enough to keep its systems operational).

A-la-carte pricing is a zero sum game for the median viewer, so long as the content and the infrastructure keep getting paid for. It is nothing like "But I just want to be able to buy an appetizer, why are you making me pay for an entree!", because appetizers and entrees are both real goods which cost money to produce, while additional permissions to change the channel to something else, are not real goods. Food prices will not drastically rise for the same dish, if the customers order less of it, while entertainment prices will.

I think people are hanging their monopolistic concerns, which are valid for the most part, on a-la-carte pricing, and it's just nonsense.

20/month is 240$ - for 240$ I can buy a season pass (40$) to 6 individual shows. Unless i want to watch more than 6 of AMCs shows concurrently, its much more expensive to pay 20$/ month. Even including shows that are over, I cant think of 6 successful shows on any single cable network. (walking dead, mad men, breaking bad, better call saul?, talking dead?, ??)

On top of this, pricing has already been set and normalized in this market.

Netflix is 7.99

amazon prime is around 8$

hulu is around 9 for ad free

hbogo is 14.99 and is seen as premium in the marketplace

I cant see any network pricing themselves above HBO and being successful.

You have succeeded in completely missing the point, by fixating on an arbitrary number while missing the simple principle that the contrived example is meant to illustrate.

If the service remains the same, the total that consumers pay will necessarily have to remain about the same. Instead of getting the freedom to change channels, they'll be stuck with the limited selection they have subscribed to. The bundling business model is a natural best fit for the technology that permits channels to be streamed simultaneously over the same lines; Anything else is a waste for the consumer and for the company.

You guys are chasing illusory discounts: "If I just had to pay $5 to ESPN and I could drop everythng I don't watch..." cannot mathematically happen, because ESPN has to crank up their prices or end most of their production to survive as soon as their customer base drops by 90% due to the end of bundling.

You have succeeded in completely missing the point.

It doesnt matter what ESPNs current revenue is, and it doesnt matter how many subscribers the lose when the shift towards a la carte.

The fact is that the pricing for sports content has already happened; if ESPN wanted to weigh in on how much sports should cost, they should have gotten to market before the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc.

ESPN can launch at whatever price they want, but if that price exceeds the price of the official league packages that i intend to watch, there is absolutely 0 chance that i subscribe to ESPN

You're chasing illusory revenues, "If I just set the price at X$, we could drop everyone who doesnt watch" cannot mathematically happen, because NFL et al would have to crank down their prices for ESPN to remain competitive.

>or end most of their production to survive

DING DING DING - this is exactly what will happen when espn finds out people dont value their more recent tabloid/drama centered content

An actual example:

I currently pay $150/year for NFL gamepass. This allows me to watch every single NFL game in HD live, including pre and post season games.

150/year is 12.50/month. IF ESPN released a service costing 13/month, i wouldn't buy it. What value does ESPN add to my existing NFL gamepass package? Do they think i would pay 13/month purely for sportscenter? purely for their terrible discussions of the latest drama in the sports world? Maybe if they offered some kind of sports news and debate like they did a decade or so ago.

This is ESPN's competition. They have to compete with existing services that already fill the need for watching sports.

I imagine ESPNs current broadcast contracts do not specifically allow them to move to a la carte structure, nor do i imagine it allows them to begin any kind of streaming service. I very much doubt the leagues are going to be very kind when renegotiating those contracts now that they all have their own streaming services.

Your analysis is all wrong. Not all programming costs the same to make or license and not all people consume the same amount of programming. Your point basically boils down to "those people whose ESPN you are subsidizing are also subsidizing your programming that they might not watch." That's true, but the two don't necessarily cancel out. Sports programming costs a lot to license because there is high demand and there's basically a monopoly.

Non-zero marginal costs would further favor a la carte pricing as it would reduce actual waste, but even with zero marginal cost there is still subsidization.

I don't disagree with you, but I could apply this same logic to the 50 gazillion channels of reality TV cable was offering me that I could not possibly care less about. I don't like subsidizing them, but I was still paying for them.

I wish there was an unbundled option so I could buy just ESPN. That is literally the only thing cable companies have that I care about. Even better for me would be to just cut the cable companies out entirely and let me pay $20 a month or something directly to ESPN for WatchESPN access.

Funny thing is, I don't watch those channels either. That's why I don't have cable, there is almost no value in it. There are maybe 2 or 3 channels that I'd want but I can't get them without paying for 70 channels I don't want.

> an unbundled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts

That subscriber will be worth a lot more once they can be targeted with individually personalized marketing content based on previous TV-watching habits, augmented with third-party data from other digital channels, web browsing history, purchasing history, etc. It's coming; YouTube proves it can be done. It's only a matter of time before we see different business models for the monetization of streaming content on more 'traditional' TV channels as well.

The alternative is a subscription model that would price out many sports fans, or obsolescence followed by slow death for want of revenue.

> It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

That's a nice use case for multicast. Worked for me over a decade ago. I can only assume the technology has gotten better since.

The number of people and expected video quality have also increased

I think that use case was implied by the OP:

With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast.

Multicast is effectively broadcast -- it's (theoretically) great if what you're distributing is a live video stream. But we're moving toward a world where the vast majority of what we're watching is on-demand. While I could be wrong about this, my strong suspicion is that the technology hasn't gotten better in the last decade; most implementations just don't scale to the level that a service like ESPN would require (i.e., millions of nodes reliably receiving HD video), and I'm not even sure most commercial Internet backbones support multicast.

Does multicast see any actual use? I was under the impression that while it's theoretically great for a live video stream, nobody ever actually uses it.

The last time I checked a few UK TV channels were doing multicast streaming, but none of the big ISPs actually supported it. I have no idea what's involved in making it work but I find it really sad that it's not used more.

Out of curiosity I dug into this a bit more. The BBC's multicast trial (which has been a trial for at least ten years now) is still running, but I assume at this point isn't going anywhere.

However BT (one of the big ISPs) uses multicast to deliver their TV service, so I assume BT their connections are capable of receiving multicasts if properly configured.

Unfortunately more and more people seem to think connecting through NAT is acceptable.

> if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.

Yup. Unfortunately, even just getting ESPN (and similar channels like FS1 etc) means buying huge bloated bundles. I'm hopeful this will change in the next couple of years though.

Sling TV. $15 a month (ESPN/ESPN2 are included).

Just give me that and the BIG10 network and I'm set.

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo...

Surely at least some of the blame can be shared with the total abdication of the educational mission on the part of thousands of university administrators. The athletic tail has been wagging the academic dog for decades longer than Tivo has been around.

People say that a lot, but most athletic departments aren't actually profitable. The biggest thing that athletics helps with is marketing exposure for the university. Applications go through the roof when a team is on TV. It improves morale in the alumni base which has a big effect in academic donations as well.

I'm a Clemson grad for example and 15 years ago, Clemson's athletic department budget was about $30 million a year (for all sports combined). Since Tivo, it's gone up to about $70 million a year but it's totally self sufficient as well. It's all fueled by donations, ticket sales and TV revenues. TV revenues account for about $20 million of that budget so half of the increase is purely from TV.

Sure, some athletics departments are "profitable", others are not. That doesn't contradict the proposition that there is too much money involved in college athletics, and that it is and was the responsibility of college presidents and boards to prevent that. Blaming Tivo for this is more ridiculous than any Tivo-blaming we ever heard from the copyright mafiaa.

The TV advertising value of college and pro football relative to everything else on TV has gone through the roof ever since skipping commercials became the norm.

If you can identify another reason why TV contracts for the SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12 and PAC 12 suddenly skyrocketed in the last 15 years I would love to hear it.

Multicast has been sitting there in the specs since forever. If ISPs ever feel like switching it on, there's your scalability problem solved.

Isn't having millions of people watching the same thing at the same time easier than millions of people watching different things at the same time?

It is on a broadcast where people are listening to a single signal (radio, antenna, satellite, etc).

Over the internet, it has to operate as a point to point TCP connection for each device so 50,000 people watching is 50,000 individual HD streams. If multicast over the internet worked it'd be another ballgame of course.

I understand the difference between broadcast as found in radio and how a "broadcast" would work over the internet.

But 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams that happen to contain the same thing still seems slightly easier than 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams with different content.

I'm taking it as a given that the technology and infrastructure is already there to support millions of people watching different streams simultaneously, since that seems to be what Netflix does.

When Netflix does it, during high viewing hours I've seen reports claiming that they account for 30% of all US internet traffic. It's still a very high bandwidth operation.

The equivalent of a CDN where each ISP has a box receiving the broadcast so that all of their local customers don't have to stream direct from ESPN will make it more tolerable, but the big hit will be on people trying to do it from cell networks.

When Netflix does it they are working with pre-optimized content. They get to prepare all of the video to stream in advance, optimize it for each screen size, transfer each variant it down to each ISP and then turn it on when it's ready. With a live feed you've got to do all that on the fly to each ISP appliance that you've got in place.

I'm sure it can be done, somehow, but I have serious concerns about the technological cost of scaling that for a huge audience. Just as a comparison here, the college football title game that just happened garnered about 29 million viewers on TV and about 800,000 streaming with WatchESPN. That was the most streaming traffic ESPN had ever had.

ironically, the only station not following the old-US media book is going away because they followed their business model.

I'd also like to add that Al Jazeera's most likely viewers are obviously going to be pretty liberal, and therefore younger and much more likely to be cord-cutters. Basically, their best demographic is going to be Millenials, and those are the most likely to not have a cable subscription.

They really shot themselves in the foot with this move.

I thought Al Jazeera was run at a loss as a propaganda expense by the Qatari government. Is that untrue?

Most of their articles and videos seem to be quite objective. Might be run as a way of raising awareness (every once in a while) of Middle Eastern progress, but I certainly wouldn't call that propaganda.

Their reports on Israel and the Syrian civil war are a very one-sided.

http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/middleeast.html

They try to be objective, but nobody blames any media for siding against ISIL.

As for Israel, I feel like Al Jazeera isn't one-sided; there simply are more articles about Palestinian deaths because there are more Palestinian deaths. Even when around 20 Israelis across a few attacks died at the end of last year, with each death heavily reported around western media, a comparative death toll puts it into perspective: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/10/mapping.... It seems that one side simply has better weapons, and so, causes more deaths.

No, it is entirely true.

Might be. But it does not matter that much. A sheikhdom is something else than your regular dictatorship. As long as you stay away from critizising the ruler directly, you can talk about pretty much everything (depends on country of course). Dubai/VAE, for example, feels like an "ok" free country to me, even if it is an absolute monarchy.

No, they didn't. Part of the terms of them being able to buy Current and retain broadcast rights with the existing networks was a requirement that AJ stop online streaming. Without the deal, they would have lost all the distribution Current came with.

This comes as absolutely no surprise at all. It doesn't matter if you are the most accurate, informed, respectable news source in the world, because almost no Americans know what Al Jazeera is, and the name evokes the image backdrop of a middle eastern city most Americans can't find on a map, discussing topics of primary interest to American Muslims and few else, while the female anchors are veiled. Not to mention it sounds like a group Americans are more familiar with that starts with "Al-".

This is almost as bad as the Latin American failure of the Chevy Nova (Spanish: no go). They could and should have named it anything, but they really seemed to think their brand would carry any weight at all.

One may say this is proof that Americans don't want truth and reason, just entertainment in their news. We do, but the simple fact is that if you fail to appeal to people's simple desires, fears, and impulses, you will fail entirely.

> the most accurate, informed, respectable news source in the world...

Let's not oversell it here. They have biases, just different biases. And last I checked, network news providers ratings are on the decline and more and more Americans are getting their news from online outlets (and as many people here have already commented, the cable offerings of Al Jazeera came at the expense of their online offerings).

Al Jazeera was nothing but a Salafist network in Liberal Suite. As much critical they were about imperfections of liberal democracies they were not even half that about Islamic Republics, blasphemy laws in ME or Gender/ LGBT rights in muslim majority nations.

Having watched it with some regularity, I disagree. Did you watch it? Or do you have some data to back it up? (I have no evidence other than my experience.)

Yes, I did, you can watch lot of their content on Youtube. I am not talking about their news, but their opinion programs.

I never said they were good, I meant that if your branding doesn't get a customer through the door then you could be selling winning lottery numbers and nobody would know.

> They could and should have named it anything, but they really seemed to think their brand would carry any weight at all.

I also wondered at the branding, but if they tried to hide their origins they would rightfully be accused of deception in a business, journalism, where credibility is paramount.

It wouldn't have mattered. CurrentTV was nowhere in the ratings, too. There just isn't a market for yet another cable news channel in the US. We're saturated with them.

I never said they had to hide their origins, just change their name. "X - an affiliate/subsidiary of Al-Jazeera." You only see it when you actually go to the channel. Then once you hear the reporting and commentary you can balance it with your predispositions, but at least they have a chance to sell themselves, if only for a minute.

If I tell you there's a new channel called "X" and you go to check it out and notice the affiliation, then your judgement will be your own. But if I recommend a network with an off-putting name, you likely won't check it out, even for a second.

Al-Jazeera just means "The Island" in Arabic. What's off putting about something called "The Island"?

I never knew that. Most Americans won't even get that close. You're trying to use logic to argue a problem of emotion and personal bias. That never works.

The Arabic is what's off-putting.

Do you feel the same when you hear "Alcohol, Algebra, Alchemy, Algorithm, Albuquerque ...etc" or you're just turned off by "Aljazeera"?

Albuquerque is a pretty tenuous example.

Anyway, I don't know. I'm not talking about me, just saying this is how a lot of people react.

No, it's not tenuous.

Americans (Spanish settlers/Mexicans?) imported the name from Spanish (Castellano) and Spanish got it from Arabic and the list I made is just arbitrary and there are many many more Arabic origin words starting with "Al" that made their way to English and don't seem to have the same negative effect on the English speaker as claimed by you and the other poster.

The etymology is not certain, but Albuquerque looks much more likely to be Latin than Arabic.

As for the rest, well, there's a difference between English words with Arabic origins and Arabic words that haven't been appropriated into English.

You can dislike the way people treat it all you want, and say it makes no sense (and I'd agree), but if you argue with how it works then you're basically yelling at the clouds.

They're are other places in Badajoz with the "AL" prefix and they're Arabic influenced so it's more likely that Albuquerque was as well than being Latin derived but my main argument stays the same that if English speaking xenophobes or bigots have any problem with the Arabic definite article "Al ال", they should cease using those words in their language to avoid public embarrassment and being labelled hypocrites.

What's the point of that main argument?

You asked a question about why certain unreasonable feel a certain way, you got an answer, and now you're arguing with the answer because you think it's unreasonable. That's silly.

Hypothetical example: let's say there was no Hitler or Hirohito but somehow Benito Mussolini - Il Duce, the leader - conquered Europe and conducted human rights abuses equal to or greater than the other Axis powers, all while expanding Italian territory through conquest.

Let's also say that you live in the Middle East, which for a while was Roman territory, the empire that Mussolini attempted to ressurect. You would have a good reason to fear Italian conquest and be distrustful of Italy in general, even if Italians themselves are generally amicable and the people in conquered territories resent the regime.

Now you hear that a major Italian news company - Il Notizie, the news - is establishing a pan-Arab station, Il Notizie Arabia. Would you trust it to be fair and balanced? Would you trust it not to have a subversive agenda?

It's not claimed, its real. Facebook and Twitter have this great thing where you can see into the minds of other people, and Al-Jazeera was trending the other day, so you got to see lots of people talking about it. Lots of hate, literally 100% because the name sounds Arabic.

Hate doesn't care about entomology. We're talking about a country that renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries" to protest one of our oldest allies, when the "fries" aren't even "french" to begin with.

Albuquerque doesn't sound Arabic. Americans are familiar with it, it just sounds funny, maybe Mexican, but it's still in America. Al-Jazeera has an Arabic logo, Arabic anchors, and an Arabic name. These are people who key in on the president's middle name of Hussein and use that to claim he's a Muslim terrorist. You honestly think they wouldn't blink an eye at an Arabic news channel?

People are perhaps a bit more xenophobic than you think they are.

Anecdotally speaking, I had no idea that the average American was so close minded like this that he would reject a channel just based on its foreign name.

This level of language chauvinism is not healthy at all.

However, I truly believe that Aljazeera punched above their weight when they ventured into the US market and that they pulled the plug quite early for any meaningful results to materialize but I think that they could find some solace in the fact that other established players like BBC would struggle considerably if they entered the US market to make headway in this saturated and hyper-competitive market.

Yes, the problem is they didn't get enough viewers. Lots of reasons for that. The people who are going to care about high-quality journalism and not care about the negative connotations of an Arabic ownership are less likely to subscribe to cable, the only place to find Al Jazeera. Conversely, the majority of people who watch cable news tend to be older and more conservative, which is why Fox News has the number one viewership among cable news channels. Most people who watch Fox News will fit into the xenophobic demographic I mentioned above. If you don't think the "average American" (in this case "American" is defined as "someone who watches American cable news channels", not actually the average American) is that closed minded, remember that in 2012, Fox News had 2 million viewers compared to CNN's >700,000. Fox News has more viewers than every other cable news channel combined. [1]

It's not necessarily about the language, it's about the connotations. If you watch Al Jazeera, you're watching the terrorist propaganda. To the majority of people who watch cable news, that's where the thinking ends. You're right, it's not healthy, it's destroying our nation and the entire world with it.

Liberals are going to be pretty happy with NPR. Younger people are going to get their news from social media, not from cable. Conservatives are going to be very happy with Fox News. Older people aren't going to want to switch their news channel to something unproven. Al Jazeera has no audience in the US if they're trying to break into the cable news market.

[1] http://press.foxnews.com/2012/12/fox-news-channel-dominates-...

Isn't this the business where renaming your channel "sy fy" and broadcasting wrestling is par for the course?

Kind of like how Fox News has news in its name but it's not news.

Too funny.

I don't have a strong opinion about your larger point. It might be correct, I'm still thinking it through. But the Chevy Nova thing is an urban legend:

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

This might be an urban myth; however, when we were travelling in Europe a few years ago, my Argentine wife just laughed and laughed when she saw a car "Pajero", which in Argentina means "wanker"…

One of the biggest names in tech changed the branding for a service in certain markets where the English title translated into profanity. It's the responsible move if you're operating globally.

Apologies for ambiguity, but this is a case where I can't be any more specific.

The Pajero is called Montero in several countries, which include the Spanish-speaking ones.

The country we were in was Switzerland, if memory serves...

Of note: it is called Pajero in Brazil, which is a Portuguese speaking country.

I wonder what happens when someone crosses the border (any border) with it.

That it gets funny I guess. Around my neighbourhood there's always a Pajero parked around. I've smiled at it for years. Childish humour never dies.

Pajero is not a Portuguese word. People that speech Spanish may smile at it and Nova, but we have plenty of jokes about Kia's BestA, that means both beast, stupid or arrogant.

Anyway, BestA sold pretty well here.

Toyota renamed the MR2 in France because 'MR deux' sounds like 'merde'

What about the tale about Pepsi and their slogan "Come to life with Pepsi!" being translated into Chinese and coming out "Pepsi will bring your dead ancestors back to life"? Or Coca-Cola being translated to "bite the wax tadpole"?

Nova failing in Latin America is a bit of a myth, though a good apocryphal story to get the point across. http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

That story always sounded off. I have to admit I mostly listen to European Spanish, but "Nova" doesn't really read like "no va", the intonation is very different.

No it is not. The only difference is which syllable is stressed.

And the pause between them. In a four letter word, I'd say that's quite different. Would you have read it as "no va"?

There's no pause between both syllables in either way of pronouncing the word. And you are right, it's not pronounced the same way, but if you intend to mock the car, you just stress the other syllable.

Stresses are pretty important in spanish. Take father/pope and potato; viva la paPA has a pretty different meaning from viva la PApa

What if someone said: "In English, 'experts exchange' sounds noticeably different from 'expert sexchange'; therefore, no one would ridicule expertsexchange.com for its similarity to the latter."

Yeah, but the story wasn't that "someone" mocked the name, it was that the car was a commercial failure because of it. As far as I know, EE had at least quite a few years of success despite the name.

The snopes debunking of Nova/no-va insists that native Spanish speakers wouldn't automatically see the similarity and irony between the words. They did, just as English speakers did for EE.

Though they both may have sold well in spite of the meaningful names.

Well, as I wrote earlier, as someone who has been fluently reading and listening to Spanish conversation, TV, magazines and books since childhood, I find it hard to believe that any significant number of Spanish speakers would automatically read the irony.

In case you're still reading this: do you mean to say the Spanish speaking world is less interested in wordplay and prone to notice such puns?

Al Jazeera US was anything but a respectable news source the past several years.

It seemed far more accurate and reported on issues glossed over or ignored by other major networks.

Do you think you'd be able to detect every possible bias?

It sounds like you're just more tolerate to their brand of bias.

He/she was challenging your assertion that they are not respectable, not claiming that they lack bias. These are very different things and you're attacking a strawman.

He/she is comparing them to other major networks and claiming they were better. I'm disagreeing with that assertion.

> This is almost as bad as the Latin American failure of the Chevy Nova (Spanish: no go)

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

...if you fail to appeal to people's simple desires, fears, and impulses, you will fail entirely.

I would argue that in that case the failure is not with the ones trying to make change, but the ones who won't accept it.

"To a large degree the press...all conform to the demands of the public. But to an equally large degree the public responds to the influence of these very same mediums of communication."

Edward Bernays, "Crystallizing Public Opinion"

Fault is a mirage. There is only success or failure

Are you asserting that AJA was accurate and informed?

It doesn't matter whether they were or not because their branding was ineffective. It's the old saying about a tree falling down in a forest and nobody being around to hear it.

I'm sure that mattered, but not as much as the overall business model.

I don't know who decided to gamble on another cable news network, but both cable news and cable in general are saturated markets in the U.S., and they're saturated on a sinking ship. It's unlikely the next generation of viewers is going to watch nearly as much "classic cable" as the currently-exiting generation.

> the female anchors are veiled

Were all those anchors veiled women? Some? Few?

Because drawing from my experience with AJE, they usually hire non conservative dressed women to present the news and they only featured veiled women for their Arabic-speaking channels but to be honest not all of them wear the veil. They still pretend not to discriminate against non-Muslims or non conservative Muslims.

Read my post again. I was talking about the impression the name gave, not the reality.

I bet the Al Jazeera logo is hard to sell in the US for a reason.

Americans know what Al Jazeera is. The problem is Americans no longer want their news from a viewpoint that doesn't have a bias in their direction.

I don't think Americans are alone in that.

It should have been named All Jazz Era. What? People like Jazz.

This is too bad. They were one of two sources of serious news on cable TV [1] and their global breath of coverage, including many important, original stories I didn't see elsewhere, was exceptional.

I always held my breath a little, expecting some propaganda because Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, but I never noticed any even in Middle East coverage. That doesn't mean it wasn't there - the point of propaganda is to convince the audience that it's legitimate.

[1] IMHO: The other serious news on cable is Bloomberg. Some of their content is obvious shilling or advertorial (bring on the CEO and give them a platform and t-ball questions), much is over-stylized, and their priority obviously is business and not other news. However, at least they address serious topics, and provide sophisticated analysis and valuable knowledge. Fox, CNN, MSNBC are a complete waste of my time - all I learn is various political groups' talking points. BBC's analysis is too superficial and too many stories are not hard news, for my taste. As always, print/text news are by far the best sources.

They do a good job of separating the regional channels from the main one. AJ English is quite different from AJ Arabic that at times I feel it's a different channel entirely. However as an Arab Muslim my goto is AJ Arabic as it focuses on the region and I feel covers important events and causes. It's documentaries and investigative pieces are awesome as well.

> AJ English is quite different from AJ Arabic that at times I feel it's a different channel entirely.

I'd be very interested to know about AJ Arabic (and I don't speak Arabic at all). If you don't mind sharing a little more: How does it differ from AJ English?

Also, maybe 15 years ago I'd hear how AJ Arabic was the only real journalism in the Arab world and a force for democracy and reform. Was that your experience? Is it still?

Finally, how and how much does AJ Arabic serve Qatar's rulers' interests? How much better or worse is it than the other government sponsored competitors (e.g., I seem to remember Saudi Arabia runs one, and of course there is the BBC).

The best coverage I've found, in English, of the Middle East is Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, both from Israel. I know people may assume they would follow the Israeli government line but I haven't noticed it in the journalism which reports much that challenges the government, including abuse of Palestinians (maybe in the editorials support the government but I don't read them, and Haaretz is against Netanyahu). They cover important stories I don't see in AJ English and cover other stories better - though I read all three anyway.

> I'd be very interested to know about AJ Arabic (and I don't speak Arabic at all). If you don't mind sharing a little more: How does it differ from AJ English?

In general, the "feel" of the channel is different, to the point where if AJ English had another name, you'd have no idea they're related. More specifically, AJ English is a bit more general in its global coverage, whereas AJ Arabic focuses more on the region. The two channels are completely independent entities actually, and it seems to work well.

> Also, maybe 15 years ago I'd hear how AJ Arabic was the only real journalism in the Arab world and a force for democracy and reform. Was that your experience? Is it still?

Personally, I believe yes, it's the only channel that actually cares about the Middle East. Granted, I've only been watching it for 8 years or so.

> Finally, how and how much does AJ Arabic serve Qatar's rulers' interests? How much better or worse is it than the other government sponsored competitors

As with any other news channel, AJ Arabic has a clear agenda. Put briefly: anti-Israel, pro-Hamas, anti-Egyptian government, pro-Brotherhood, anti-Iran, anti-Syrian government. Even with their clear biases, I feel they do a good job showing both sides of the equation, especially in their discussion programs.

The other competitors in the region are Al Arabiya, BBC Arabic, and France 24 Arabic. Al Arabiya is sponsored by the Saudi government I believe, but is headquartered in the UAE. Similar to AJ, it is anti-Israel and anti-Iran/Syria, but the rest is the opposite. So as you can see they usually cover regional news differently. BBC Arabic and France 24 are pro-Israel and neutral when it comes to Iran.

> The best coverage I've found, in English, of the Middle East is Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, both from Israel. [...] They cover important stories I don't see in AJ English and cover other stories better - though I read all three anyway.

I have not read it to be honest. I might take a look at it when I get the chance. However I would be truly surprised if it was actually neutral.

The way I see it is that there simply is no neutral news source. For me however, I feel that AJ Arabic properly represents and covers the Arab/Muslim causes, and does so in a professional manner.

>The way I see it is that there simply is no neutral news source.

Very much agree here

>BBC Arabic and France 24 are pro-Israel

I find this hard to believe, especially BBC Arabic being pro-Israel. The English language BBC is pretty critical- it would be surprising if the Arabic language articles are more neutral or sometimes positive.

Thanks for taking the time to respond; it's hard to get that perspective in the U.S. and on HN.

> As with any other news channel, AJ Arabic has a clear agenda.

> The way I see it is that there simply is no neutral news source.

While it's literally true (there is no perfectly neutral news source) I disagree. There are large differences of degree. Similarly we could say that neighborhood A as a burglary rate of 1% and neighborhood B has a rate of 0.01%, therefore all neighborhoods are dangerous. While literally true, the statement obscures the facts.

In the U.S., Fox News is much more biased than the NY Times (or AJAM), but of course the latter sources do have some bias.

Nearly all major players in the region have a dedicated news channel/network in Arabic to serve or defend their interests and disseminate propaganda.

Less well known players that often get overlooked in similar discussions are:

1) RT Arabic from Russia

2) DW Arabic from Germany

3) TRT El Arabiya from Turkey

4) Sky News Arabia (It's more of an Abu Dhabi rulers' mouthpiece than a Murdoch's)

The country that's surprisingly missing at least conspicuously is the US but they do have a news channel « Al-Hurra » but man it's pathetic and silly even for the region's standards.

AJ+ (their social media offspring) is pretty well disguised. I always like to watch their video news items from their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish) but it took me a while (months) to figure out that AJ stood for Al Jazeera.

I'm sorry but why do people love a news organization that is funded by Qatar? People claim that they were completely separate but they weren't at all and gripped by controversy that one would expect from an organization based out of Qatar [1]. I think there are better sources for American and global news than what is essentially the media arm for the corrupt and fascist government of Qatar.

[1] https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/al-jazeera-...

Because oddly, in their attempt to build credibility, or maybe because a completely different set of people ran the American branch or the organization, the American version of it was really really good. It spoke out about issues other new orgs ignore, had little in the way of sensationalism and focus on non-sense stories and celebrity scandals. I expected some Islamic propaganda, but it was shockingly progressive in a lot of things it reported on (thinking mainly of its investigative specials). They would talk about the issues with drug prohibition, abuses by police, violations of free speech, one of the only networks that covered privacy issues especially when it comes to the Snowden leaks, NSA, etc and gave it more than the 4th grade reading level version of it and gave time to both arguments, didn't just end the discussion with "because terrorists/pedophiles" like most networks. Jon Oliver regularly used their clips in his show for a reason.

They would also mention their campaign to free investigative journalists jailed by the Muslim Brotherhood run government in Egypt.

> I expected some Islamic propaganda, but it was shockingly progressive

The Islamist/conservative propaganda is reserved for the Arabic speaking channels such as their main channel AJN. They usually adopt editorial policies and fit their narrative based on the target market and Qatari foreign government policy goals. So, in the Arabic-speaking market, they push reactionary and backward messages to accommodate their conservative Islamist audience beside helping Qatar achieve goals like the wars in Yemen, Syria or Iraq (Sectarian and Sunni dominant militant propaganda) while for its English-speaking channels like AJE, they adopt softer stance on those issue and cater more for the Western liberal viewer with local relevant stories and progressive takes on current affairs.

> They would also mention their campaign to free investigative journalists jailed by the Muslim Brotherhood run government in Egypt.

Sisi the military dictator who staged the coup in 2013 not the MB who jailed those 3 journalists and then reluctantly freed them after much fanfare.

Knowing very little about what AJA actually broadcast but knowing quite a lot about the Qatari regime I can't help thinking that AJA were not the least biased TV news outlet in the States, but rather the one whose bias was least perceptible to the well-educated, relatively young, slightly liberal-leaning, frequenters of HN.

This is exactly my thoughts exactly. Reality is biased. It just depends which opinions and ideologies you subscribe to. I am progressive and am against police brutality and a lot of the drug policies, I just could never trust the intentions of the Qatari news organization. I read the NYT for domestic and world news. Being Jewish and with all of my relatives in Israel, I read Times of Israel and Haaretz for Israel / Middle East coverage. I am a news junky and I subscribe to both NYT and Haaretz.

It's sort of like the Middle Eastern version of the Christian Science Monitor. Kooky religion, surprisingly professional and credible newspaper.

I wouldn't expect them to be objective about stories in or involving Qatar, but what proportion of important news is that? A source whose biases are irrelevant to you is almost as good as an unbiased source.

Al Jazeera and their AJ+ are funded by the Qatar monarchy. I closely monitor their "news" on Facebook, the hidden agenda is so obvious! I think they might be closing down because oil price keeps dropping.

All media has a hidden agenda - its nice to get a different one sometimes, because when you're only exposed to one all the time you start to forget it has an agenda. There are many things not said and topics not covered in US media, the first and foremost being any direct representations of people suffering from US-led military ventures.

There's no independent media when it comes to geopolitics, unfortunately. We as hackers should challenge the status quo!

Soft Islamism

It's a sad commentary on the state of America's appetite for intelligent analysis when serious journalism can't compete with attractive talking heads ignorantly spouting talking points. Obama may have said that the increased political rancor was one of the greatest regrets of his presidency, but I think this points to how little of that was attributable to him.

Though I'd be willing to bet that their name was half their problem. With the amount of xenophobia we're seeing these days, a large percentage of the population likely wrote them off based solely on that and was never exposed to their content.

More of a commentary on the appetite of the average cable consumer. I imagine their online business will see an uptick as they do more streaming content and (hopefully) continue to publish interesting pieces and documentaries, especially on the ME, that are hard to find elsewhere.

I don't think the internet is any better. Sure, it can sustain some pockets of awesome journalism, but sites specializing in clickbait are the most prevalent.

I'm gonna bet that most of their american customers actively consume the website more than their divested assets.

It's a sad commentary on the state of America's appetite for intelligent analysis when millions of people watch "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report" and think they are watching intelligent analysis. While both shows might have some intelligent content, both are primarily entertainment shows.

I don't watch any cable news channels myself. I have little appetite for them, and especially for the commercials.

Serious journalism is way, way more expensive than the talking head stuff. Even if it costs a few rating points it makes sense to run the talking heads.

This is a sad end to a line of good news services in the US.

My ex gf and I used to be regular viewers of Newsworld International. They showed excellent international news programs and a lot of broadcasts from CBC. We were disappointed when Current took over and watched the switchover as NWI's cast signed off the last time and Current started.

Current turned out to be pretty interesting. They were aiming for a younger demographic and were among the first cable networks to really integrate an online presence. It wasn't the same as NWI but had good things going on and we enjoyed watching. When I moved to SF I even worked there for a short period and got to experience the energy of the team at the time.

We used to watch Al Jazeera online too. They've always had really good journalism and frequently would have better coverage of American issues than any mainstream news media here.

When AJ bought Current, it didn't really make a lot of sense to me as a product. I think AJ wanted to make a move into American cable news, but the department responsible for that wasn't the ones handling their existing online English content. They wanted Current for the cable tv slot, in much the same way Current wanted the slot from NWI. I don't know a lot about the industry, but I think this is something like limited numbers of liquor licenses and taxi medallions in cities.

So Al Jazeera shut down the Current office here in SF and opened a news room in DC. They didn't do anything with the online presence Current and AJ already had, and actually made it harder to get the old English content here.

Now they're shutting down and so ends a line of good international news in the US.

Al Jazeera proper however spins this as increasing their direct (online) presence in the U.S: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/al-jazeera-16011315172...

It always did seem weird to me how much Al Jazeera America focused on very local issues, when the entire point of going outside of U.S. media, to me, was to get a more balanced view on global issues (by aggregation, not saying AJ doesn't have its own biases). So maybe, for those of us who get our news online, this might actually be a good news. On the other hand, it makes cable TV news in the U.S. even more homogeneous than it already is...

This is unfortunate but expected. Al Jazeera has a severely unfair reputation in America, and most people probably had no idea of the difference between AJ(Qatar) and AJ(America). Hopefully they will continue to have coverage in America, and this doesn't actually mean their total exit of America-based reporting.

I don't think AJ had much of a reputation at all in the US. I wouldn't even know where to find it.

>“Most Americans associate Al Jazeera with Al Qaeda”[0]

[0] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/americans-associate-al-j...

Well, if The New York Daily News says so...

It got pretty famous after 9/11. I even have their app. But I mentioned to some Christian conservative family members that if they really wanted to understand what was happening in the Middle East (this was when the Egyptian general, who was voted out of power, overthrew the elected government and took leadership again) they should try Al Jazeera.

Their response suggested that in their circles it was considered a very bad source of information. So at least among some groups it has a strong reputation.

My cable company bundled it away with the expensive foreign language channels, guaranteeing that almost nobody watched it. Add in their retreat from online streaming and it is no mystery why people were not watching.

Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) summarized Al Jazeera's collapse very succinctly:

"Al Jazeera America execs chose early on to try to be a voice-less, diluted version of CNN rather than embracing its global identity & brand."

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/687352891372339200

I did not have a chance to see Al Jazeera America, but based on the number of times John Oliver used AJA clips on his show, and based on the topics related to those clips, I strongly suspected I was missing out.

I'd like to know when things our going wrong in our society (because that's how you can start to fix them), without the weird pro-Russian slant of a channel like RT.

Al Jezeera is an excellent news station. Much better than the others for being more fact oriented. Unfortunately its all about ratings today, facts be damned.

I think they give up too easily. I bet if they 1) changed the name to something "all American" and 2) made a reality show about what goes on behind the scenes, that might have been a big enough of a "killer app" to propel the network out of the shadows.

However I was disappointed that AJ got rid of the Young Turks.

I like AJ news quite a bit, their election night report is often the best IMHO (no real bias) but once they launched you couldn't get english streams of their content and our TV plan didn't include them... Maybe now I will be able to get streams again and start watching it more.

Man this stinks. Al Jazeera America is reliable and has done some solid reporting over the years. It wasn't afraid to call a spade a spade. Next to BloombergTV it's the only news channel worth watching.

On a tin-foil hat aside, but the timing on this; coming a few weeks after they ran the story about performance enhancing drug use by some big name athletes...I can't help but think the two are somehow related.

Having seen and understood just a few fragments of Al Jazeera behaviour in Arabic, I have some difficulty in trusting it in English either.

E.g. just today came up this post which points out how Al Jazeera used a picture:

https://twitter.com/ranaharbi/status/685357579615232000

They stole a picture taken by photographer Serkan Gülsen in Istanbul in 2007 from his Flickr feed

https://www.flickr.com/photos/serkangulsen/771185410/in/date...

and now (January 2016) published it as evidence of suffering in the town of Madaya.

It's likely that the suffering in Madaya is more than horrible, but why be so lazy as to forge a picture like this? Are they actually trying to destroy their reputation, or do they just trust that the Arabic audience will not notice?

And if it does that in Arabic, do I trust it in English?

Good riddance.

If it was closing because of government intervention, censorship, or anything else like that, I would be fighting it, of course. But since it the main reason for the fact that it's closing is sincere audience disinterest, I'm pretty glad.

"Al Jazeera America went on the air in August 2013 after it bought Al Gore’s Current TV for $500 million."

Why did they pay half billion for Current TV? First mistake.

... like paying scalper's price for a ticket onto the Titanic after it's already hit the iceberg. ;)

Maybe that bought them existing distribution deals worth that much (or more)? Can't think of another reason.

Airlines have done it with routes and gate access in the past, so that does make sense.

For influence? If you can't outright bribe a politician, you pay well over asking for his company (or house, or anything else). And then you hope he lends you a willing ear when you need a favor.

Good point, but I wonder how much influence Al really has anymore? What would Qatar want from him, anyway?

The naming of the channel and hence branding was a real stupid move by them. As if lesser informed members of the public would see past their collectively understood common enemy meme AL-*.

It doesn't take a PhD in philosophy to prescient this. Why couldn't they just have chosen something more "user friendly". Hell I even got talked behind my back by HR in a world class consultancy (CAPGEMENI, there I said it) firm for reading Al Jazeera, as if it was something dangerous and that I had dangerous intents (Nothing further happened).

This is too bad as I find the news on Al Jazeera to be more balanced then CNN, Fox, or MSNBC. Unfortunately it seems people want a spin on news. Al Jazeera is to the tv news as a long form article is to written journalism.

I remember hearing about this channel being hyped in the media but I never was able to watch it (required more expensive cable plan) and also I never even saw it being referenced online like from youtube or anyone.

As a percentage of the population almost no one watches cable news. Fox's best nights sometimes approach a significant fraction of one percent of the nations population, usually less. And all other channels are far, far lower ratings.

Another thing to consider is MSNBC is also nearly unwatched. If you thought 28K AJ viewers during daytime was bad, imagine MSNBC at exactly half or 14K viewers. Given deep enough pockets, AJ could have continued.

Narrowcasting is strange, watching channels fight over almost no viewers is like watching academics fight over nothing. Yet supplying the almost no viewers with an internet feed would require quite a few gigs/sec of internet bandwidth. There's quite a wide, unserved gap in the media industry between "a couple people watch me on youtube" and "I have a cable TV channel". There's probably a startup opportunity in there, somehow.

If you thought 28K AJ viewers during daytime was bad, imagine MSNBC at exactly half or 14K viewers.

While I don't think you're intentionally cherry-picking numbers here, I'm fairly sure you're quoting a Mediaite article about AJAM beating MSNBC during the 2PM newscast in mid-2015. Those are not total viewership numbers. If you want to compare cable news networks, it'd be better to compare their primetime viewerships. AJAM had trouble breaking 30K in primetime, according to the NYT, but at least as of August 2015 (the most recent data I can find), MSNBC's primetime total viewership was 639K -- actually beating CNN slightly.

As for "almost no one watches cable news," well: yes, but. Given how much of the HN discussion is centering around cord cutting, it's worth considering how many people get their news from the web sites of CNN and friends. In January 2015, for instance, cnn.com had over 64M unique visitors; foxnews.com had about 55M, while nbcnews.com had about 30M -- even though NBC News has far more viewers than CNN (nearly 10M compared to CNN's under 1M).

Sources:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/al-jazeera-america-beat-msnbc-for... http://www.mediaite.com/tv/august-2015-ratings-fox-news-1-in... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/business/media/al-jazeera-... http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/cable-news-fact-sheet/ http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/abc-david-muir-nbc-lester-ho...

I was annoyed when this launched because it was no longer easy to get to the English language version of Al Jazeera even if you wanted to, unless you took steps to change your location.

Actually, in the US when they put up the aljazeera/america site they started automatically routing me away from aljazeera/english. I pointed this out via email, and said I preferred the English version (Europe slant vs American) and they put a link at the bottom of the page to allow people to choose the English site. So try them- they are (were? it was a while back) very responsive.

>And Al Jazeera America has not been free of controversy in recent months. In November, the news station’s general counsel, David W. Harleston, was suspended following a report in The New York Times that he did not appear to be licensed to practice law. In late December, Al Jazeera aired an hourlong documentary that linked some of the biggest stars in Major League Baseball and the National Football League to performance-enhancing drugs. The most prominent athlete mentioned in the report was the Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning, who angrily denied the report, calling it “complete garbage” and “totally made up.”

Lets not forget that they are being sued for libel

http://deadspin.com/ryan-howard-ryan-zimmerman-sue-al-jazeer...

I surprised their is no discussion of that here. It might not be the most important story Al Jazeera had broken, but it was their biggest pop culture story in a country that often puts a huge pop culture emphasis on their news. The story has been mostly ignored by the mainstream American media and the people accused were more aggressive in their responses than similar athletes have been after similar reports. I can't remember the last time a news organization was immediately sued for libel after these type of accusations.

If you are being critical of Al Jazeera, it was a shoddy reporting job and didn't merit being published. If you are being generous, it shows they have almost no impact on American news cycles. Either way, the response wasn't good news for Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera in general and its US arm in particular were always more of an instrument of foreign policy for Qatar than a money-making endeavor. I covered the channel as a journalist at a competing news organization, and spoke with dozens of journalists on the inside of AJ.

My guess is that Qatar decided they didn't want to waste quite as much money and time trying to sway public opinion in the US. The Arabic version of AJ has always been much more important. Pure speculation, but the cuts may be due to the plunging price of oil, which in turn is affected by the slump of the Chinese economy.

Al Jazeera tended to be more or less balanced when it came to western news, however, the propaganda was clear when it came to middle eastern/ Israel issues. It was in my opinion no different from how RT(Russian today) operates. AJ is still quite popular in UK though, unlike the russian channel.

It's sad that it won't be easy to find news in the United States that represents the view of the Emir of Qatar.

Too bad. Al Jazeera America should have renamed themselves for the American market. Not to hide who they are, but to get past any initial negative impression.

They often called themselves "AJ America" or "AJAM"

Good! now I can live stream the international al jazerra broadcast. They shut that down for US after the launch of this american channel

What does this mean for "AJ+", their SF-based social-tech-media-incubator-youth-mobile-blah thing?

That's what I was curious about too. I'd imagine AJ+ will be closing with them no?

I think they're keeping AJ+, for now at least.

AJ+ is all the worst things about social media. These bite sized share friendly hip news clips about complex issues lacking tons of context. Their Israel coverage is fucking terrible. I have to hand it to them though. They are very clever for coming up with it.

Every time there is news somehow connected to Gore, I can't help but think somewhere in a parallel universe, the supreme court stayed out of election politics, didn't hand the election to Bush instead of Gore

then 9/11 never happened the following year because he actually paid attention to the memo about "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" - then Iraq was never invaded - then the TSA was never created - Gitmo wasn't created - the NSA didn't abuse its power - then credit default swaps were stopped in their tracks before they destroyed the economy.

Imagine how incredibly different the US would be today if that series of events was alternated.

It would be a lot different, but in that same universe, the entire population of the Earth was killed by a virus spread by unicorn poop, so be glad it didn't happen.

You consider a couple votes by the supreme court changing everything to fairy tales?

It really, seriously, could have been in favor of Gore. Not far fetched at all.

In fact they could have declined to hear the case entirely, which they probably should have done.

I know. Really makes you think, right? Think of all the bad things that have happened in the past 16 years. Now imagine they didn't happen. Wow. Just one vote.

They'd have evacuated New Orleans before Katrina hit. They wouldn't have canceled Firefly. Steven Avery wouldn't have been convicted. Imagine.

I find it really amusing that you noted "then credit default swaps were stopped in their tracks before they destroyed the economy" as one of the critical junctures in the US economy. It was, and most people dont realize that. CDS allowed large parts of the CDOs to become AAA and enabled all manners of craziness in 2002-2007.

Sadly, it often gets blamed on Clinton/Gore given the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 signed weeks before their term ended. The reality was all about how it was implemented/regulated/enforced, which was all during Bush's term. You note correctly, things would have been very different under Gore. For one thing, courageous individuals like Brooksley Born would have been allowed into the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born#Born_and_the_OT...

I thought the coverage was pretty crummy, back when it had just launched which was the last time I looked at it. Hopefully we'll get access to Al Jazeera English videos back when AJA goes away!

Edit: Why is this off the front page already?

Is there any indication we will? I really hope so! I enjoyed the AJE content and thought AJA was pretty terrible. It really sucked that they cut off people in the USA from watching AJE everywhere.

Indeed, I was a little surprised that AJA was both a thing at all and also a thing completely different from AJE. I first discovered AJE while living abroad in a place where the only english news channels were CNN, BBC and AJE, and my impression was that AJE was worthy to stand alongside the other two channels.

The Intercept also has a piece on this development with some background information https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/al-jazeera-america-termi....

I actually liked AJ to watch besides watching RT a change of the mainstream media news sources, sad to see them go. They were like the BBC but had reporting from more places that even typical alternative news channesl dont spend time on. They also had great documentaries from time to time.

Wonder if they'll ever come back perhaps in a different form

The most funny take on Al Jazeera you'll read today:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...

Does this mean Al Jazeera English will be viewable online again in the US? I never watched AJA because I don't particularly want to watch US-Focused news and I have never had and will never have a cable subscription.

I think it would have been a real challenge to get to the mainstream with their logo and their finances [0]

  with financing from the deep pockets of the Qatar government

when the sentiments being purported by Fox, CNN et al were in stark contrast.

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/business/media/al-jazeera-...

Even without that financing, and without the logo, the financing itself is a good reason to not trust them as a source.

I'm sure there are other news sources that should be de-legitimized due to their funding, and it would be nice if they too go away. Due to the current nature of how people consume their news it creates echo-chamber bubbles that only reenforce misinformation or misleading perspectives.

It's not the funding. It's the editorial independence that matters. Should we have believed NBC prior to 2013 on national security issues, because they were owned by General Electric, a defense contractor that would make handsome profits in the case of war?

Good luck in finding any media outlet that doesn't have financial ties to the subjects of their coverage.

You shouldn't dismiss Al Jazeera out of hand. The (sad) fact is, that Al Jazeera is pretty much the least biased on most straight forward of all the media outlets in the Middle East. They actually report dissenting views. No, they're not perfect, but are in a completely different league compared to their regional rivals.

> They actually report dissenting views.

But not critical of the ruling family in Qatar and that actually what counts the most and would demonstrate their journalistic integrity and editorial independence but they're hypocrites and their credibility is suffering as a consequence.

The Economist.

Even without that financing, the financing itself is a good reason to not trust them

i suspect you meant to convey something different.

Victim of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency

Some staffers saw that as a tacit admission that falling oil prices were behind the closure

And just when it seemed to start gaining traction, too. Pity.

I am sorry, I have seen two interviews by Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera. The bias was really really obvious. I don't buy the arguments about how good it is by some commenters here.

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