Al Jazeera's Blackout on Bahrain

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.