Just an interesting thing I noticed about Al-Jazeera a long time ago. I've pointed it out a few times on online forums, but I think it's worth warranting a small blog post - though it might be a few months late.
When Egypt was constantly in the headlines back in January, Al-Jazeera emerged as the first-stop broadcaster for news on the burgeoning region-wide movement. And while it has been brilliant in its coverage of Egypt and Libya, with Bahrain we see that Al-Jazeera is not without its own agenda, beyond seemingly embracing the 'Arab Spring'.
My interest in Bahrain's events at its peak, I was almost constantly on Al-Jazeera, reading up on everything happening. And its coverage was good to begin with. In the first month of the protest,; it seemed they had the interest of spreading the Bahraini peoples' message at heart.
Things went sour in Bahrain when on the 14th of March, exactly a month after the then-called 'Pearl Revolution' began, the Saudi army rolled in, dispersing the protesters from their camp and decimating the iconic pearl roundabout. Suddenly, Al Jazeera, which had so readily reported every morsel of news from Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, stopped reporting on Bahrain. On both Arabic and English channels.
The news on Bahrain only trickled in. On the Al Jazeera website, some might remember that on the right was a banner titled along the lines of "Arab Revolutions", with Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain listed. Bahrain's banner was silently omitted during this time, and navigating to the Bahrain news page became awkward and confusing.
There was little on the video side, and the written end of their news site was shoddy - something I admittedly only noticed because of my own connection with Bahrain. Their written story on the closure of the only independent newspaper told of how 'Masur' Al-Jamri was forced to resign as editor. Perhaps if it weren't my own father in the news, or if I had little enough knowledge of Arabic to think 'Masur' was a name it would have just passed me by. And while I'm usually not bothered about typographical errors, this one is above and beyond 'the graudian' level of mistakes and struck me as clear evidence that not only was the journalist sloppily careless, so too was their editor. I actually sent them an email pointing out the mistake, but they never fixed it. Unfortunately I've since lost the bookmark and their website makes it difficult to search for months-old articles, but if I can find it I'll link to it as proof.
As further evidence of Al Jazeera's silence, there were tensions within the corporation itself over their coverage of the events, highlighted by their Beirut Bureau Chief, Ghassan Ben Jeddo, resigned on the 23rd of April, citing its near non-existent coverage of events in Bahrain as a reason why.
This was all stranger still, since on the 9th March, only five days before Saudi's involvement, AJE released a sympathetic episode of their People & Power program titled: Bahrain: Fighting for Change.
The state of emergency Bahrain had been put under was lifted in June with the departure of the Saudi army. I think it was around then that Al Jazeera began to cover Bahrain more vocally and with better editorial standards, however by that time I had lost faith in AJE as a reliable news source on the Middle East and stopped visiting altogether. They did, to their credit, release a decent documentary titled Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark in August, though this annoyingly masks their lack of coverage of the events when they were current.
I've had some people use this documentary as evidence that Al Jazeera isn't biased against Bahrain, and while that may no longer be their stance, that doesn't negate the fact that, at the time when Al Jazeera's English channel was widely regarded as the go-to place for news on the 'Arab Spring', they had a media blackout on a nation that could have used the global support AJE could produce.
And why? Was it Saudi pressure? American pressure? Or perhaps pressure from within Qatar - let us not forget Al Jazeera is owned by a member of the Qatari royal family, who may have feared the spreading of revolutionary fervour in their own country. When they could promote political freedom in far-away North Africa, Al Jazeera did so whole-heartedly, but it seems that when the cries for democracy could be heard nearer to home, Al Jazeera's owners appear to have had second-thoughts about the message they were helping to spread.
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