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.

Clouding Reality with Labels - Arab Spring and Winter

The label given to the cultural revolution that has enveloped the Middle East has been deceptive to everyone who has used it. It was being called the 'Arab Spring' at least as early as March. A populist movement, it was widely regarded as a force for the Good of the region. But this simplification made it easy to ignore the complexities. The ground-breaking revolution of Tunisia, the expulsion of Mubarak from Egypt and the romantic war of the Libyans - which was only viewed as brutal with the death of Qaddafi, no longer a pharoahic figure but a victim of war. These overshadowed the struggles of Yemen, Bahrain and even to some extent Syria.

To call it the 'Arab Spring' is to paint the whole movement with a single brush, ignoring all the intricacies unique to each nation. It is a simplification that reeks of pan-Arabism and glosses over the difference in every country.