Al Jazeera condemns Israeli government decision to shut down channel
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
See: https://honestreporting.com/damage-done-how-al-jazeeras-fake...
So to say truth has been silenced is off the mark imo
Edit: haaretz link https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/2024-0...
however this example is that they interviewed someone who made an inflammatory claim, and then the next day removed the claims when it came out that they were false. That hardly seems that bad for our modern news landscape.
And then you have a meme of some AJ reporters saying "Terrorists in press dresses." captioned "You can't put lipstick on a pig, you can't put a press vest on a terrorist."
That's pretty inflammatory and biased too!
https://foreignpressassociation.online/who-we-are/
Al Jazeera isn't free media. It's the propaganda arm of Qatar.
"Several journalists have been arrested and jailed, or even deported – in most cases for taking too close an interest in the working conditions of immigrant workers. The authorities do not hesitate, if necessary, to convict bloggers who are local residents of “disseminating false information”. This is how the blogger Malcolm Bidali was detained for a month before being deported to his country of origin, Kenya, after paying a fine." - https://rsf.org/en/country/qatar
Conflating Qatar's other issues with Al Jazeera is misdirection.
Media watch groups consistently rate Al Jazeera as "neutral/balanced", with their perspective "skewing slightly left", which doesn't seem particularly consistent with Qatar.
> Ad Fontes Media rates Al Jazeera in the Skews Left category of bias and as Reliable, Analysis/Fact Reporting in terms of reliability.
> All Sides rates Al Jazeera as "Leans Left"
> Al Jazeera equal in reliability to CNN
They are certainly not without issue, to be sure. But still.
Sources: https://adfontesmedia.com/al-jazeera-bias-and-reliability/ , https://www.allsides.com/news-source/al-jazeera-media-bias
And consistently rated as a neutral and reliable media source.
The two concepts, though they may have some overlap, are not one and the same.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/al-jazeera/ - Rated "mixed" on "factual" reporting, i.e. some facts, some lies... i.e. rates as propaganda.
EDIT: "and Mixed for factual reporting due to failed fact checks that were not corrected and misleading extreme editorial bias that favors Qatar."
EDIT2: https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/al-jazeera-%E2%80%98defe...
Even your link here says:
> In review, Al Jazeera reports news with minimally loaded wording in their headlines and articles ... properly sourced from credible news agencies. When reporting USA news, there is minimal bias in reporting ... In general, straight news reporting has a minimal bias; however, as a state-funded news agency, Al Jazeera is typically not critical of Qatar.
The failed fact checks were regarding two articles that weren't corrected.
> In 2017, Al Jazeera aired an investigative report of Britain’s Israel lobby. Following the airing, Ofcom (the UK government-approved regulatory and competition authority) received complaints from many pro-Israeli British activists, including one former Israeli embassy employee. They were accused of anti-Semitism, bias, unfair editing, and infringement of privacy, which was later cleared by Ofcom, who said the piece was not anti-semitic and was, in fact, investigative journalism.
Huh.
> Further, Saudi Arabia and three other Arab nations demanded Qatar to shut down Al-Jazeera. Al Jazeera rebuts the accusations here.
So pro-Arab that SA (and UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt) demanded Qatar shut them down...
I never said Al Jazeera is perfect, and as noted, there is a reluctance to criticize the Qatari government.
I take less issue with "some of their opinion pieces are vocally anti-Israel", unless the contention is that nothing Israel can do can be criticized for ... reasons?
All, not some. I've been reading them regularly for a few months and have never seen anything that isn't Anti Zionist, let alone pro Israel, and this was way before the current war - I'm sure its much worse now.
Answer these two questions and you'll be able to answer your own question.
Major US news agencies regularly ask DoD if certain topics are okay for them to cover. Beyond that, most relevant news in the US is owned by billionaires that regularly repress news that would paint them in a bad light.
Anyway, no news agency is perfect.
This submission is about Al Jazeeras operations in Israel—which is supposed to have press freedom. Israel raided and closed the Israel operations, and banned Al Jazeera’s journalists from operating in Israel.
All that said, I’m not sure you last point goes without saying. There is nothing which fundamentally prevents receiving funding from a country which suppresses press freedom, which prevents you from doing free journalism. Will receiving funding cause editorial bias? Sure, but if receiving funding automatically made you a propaganda arm for the entity funding you, then you should really question whether western media is a propaganda arm for free market capitalism, or if Hacker News was a propaganda arm for venture capitalist Y Combinator.
Oh.
“A BBC team visited the scene, but was prevented from filming or going into the hotel by police.”
It’s the kind of behaviour you expect in Egypt
https://www.wired.com/2011/01/al-jazeera-closed/
That was followed by arrests
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/29/268481172...
https://freedomhouse.org/country/israel https://rsf.org/en/country/israel
https://freedomhouse.org/country/egypt https://rsf.org/en/country/egypt
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68961753
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said they had filed a request to the country's Supreme Court to issue an interim order to overturn the ban.
The Foreign Press Association (FPA) urged the Israeli government to reconsider its decision, saying the shut down of Al Jazeera in the country should be "a cause for concern for all supporters of a free press". The FPA said in a statement that Israel now joins "a dubious club of authoritarian governments to ban the station", and warned that Mr Netanyahu has the authority to target other foreign outlets that he considers to be "acting against the state". The Committee to Protect Journalists' (CPJ) Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna echoed the same concerns, saying: "The Israeli cabinet must allow Al Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime." The UN's Human Rights office also called the Israeli government to reverse the ban, posting on X: "A free & independent media is essential to ensuring transparency & accountability. Now, even more so given tight restrictions on reporting from Gaza."
But yes all those terrorist groups like the UN, Foreign Press Association, ACRI, are all irrelevant, all we need is the IDF mouthpiece and Baghdad Bob.
Are they telling lies? Maybe not.
Are they partial? Yes.
The fact is that on this topic the propaganda with all its disinformation and misinformation is persistent, pervasive in media, and potent. You can start to see it for yourself — simply take a shallow dive into the history of this subject and you will immediately notice the degree of the active distortion of all discourses on this topic in the modern media.
It won’t take you a weekend to read any one of the below books on this topic. After which you will start to notice how the journalists and the op-ed authors leave out highly relevant details regarding the origins of the problems in order to — time and time again - blame the Palestinians for their plight and ultimately frame them as responsible for their suffering.
It’s not the Zionists that steal Palestinian land and demolish/steal existing houses to build new settlements it’s the Palestinians that didn’t accept a supposedly “fair peace deal” while nobody mentions that said deal requires giving up the right of return of millions of refugees displaced in 1948. It’s not the F16 pilot that bombed the residential compound filled with civilians it’s the civilians that voted a decade ago for Hamas. And on and on.
Read a short book and start to see for yourself.
1. The Hundred Years War on Palestine - Khalidi (Palestinian Arab author)
2. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Pappe (Israeli Jewish author)
Infact Arabs have gone to war with Israel many times, so when you see the 10,000 foot view, its very different to just to 1000 foot view focusing on "Palestine"