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Comment by gymbeaux | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the Al Jazeera America (“AJAM”) news channel. They weren’t banned per sé, but it’s obvious they were doomed from the start. An Arab news network operating in the United States… if you think TikTok had a target painted on its back for being Chinese-owned… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America

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They arent "just" an arab media. They are financed and controlled by the dictatorship of qatar. That is like claiming Russia Today was domed because it was a "slavic" network. No it was domed because it is propaganda financed and controlled by a dictatorship.

Technically the BBC is a state broadcasting service subject to King Charles who, AFAIK, nobody voted for.

State run propaganda networks are actually a pretty good source of information; they are well resourced and have a vested interest in being perceived as high-credibility so they can tip the scale on a small number of issues critical to the state. And good propaganda is mostly done by omission and careful fact selection, although a lot of the bit-player dictatorships aren't competent enough to handle good propaganda.

It always rub me the wrong way that YouTube puts a "this is a state actor" disclaimer on a video uploaded by the well-known public media corporation of a western democracy, but put zero disclaimer whatsoever on a random video uploaded by an anonymous account created 2 minutes ago.

I thought it was normal to take media with whatever slant it had and look for evidence supressed by others, check a few opposing outlets and piece together a narrative as close as possible to neutral. When thise outlets aren’t available we’re likely to get a much more distorted story.

UK is millions of times better than Qatar but BBC is not too great. Somethings are great with BBC not everything. Fox news? Qatar doesn't micromanage everything.

And Al Arabiya isnt banned because...?

TikTok wasn't banned. It was required to be sold but ByteDance refused to do so, probably because the CCP won't let them.

Even the Palestinian authority banned Al Jazeera

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-authority-...

Because they were leaned on by Israel.

Citation needed.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are not exactly friends, they don't need much convincing to ban Al Jazeera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict

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