Surprisingly honest and objective, but it is so because its author is so. NY Times, by Hussein Ibish. Excerpt; read on here; Why America Turned Off Al Jazeera
WASHINGTON — The closing of Al Jazeera America, expected in April, is a sad conclusion to a project that was by turns uplifting and inspiring as well as troubling and depressing. Its demise offers a lesson in both the limitations of public diplomacy and the obstacles to providing high-quality television journalism.
Al Jazeera America was the latest, and perhaps most ambitious, branch of a media empire that the tiny but wealthy Gulf emirate of Qatar has used to project its influence, first regionally and then globally. The American-specific incarnation, begun in 2013, was partly an effort to rebrand for the United States the earlier iterations of the franchise, Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English. But the American network was hobbled from the start by this very legacy.
Because Al Jazeera Arabic overtly promoted Doha’s foreign policy objectives, the network was controversial and disliked by virtually every other government in the region. The Arabic station introduced a freewheeling reporting style — except for avoiding any criticism of Qatar — that transfixed Arab audiences with previously unheard-of debates.
Impartial it was not: A hefty dose of old-fashioned Arab nationalism and a strong bias for the Muslim Brotherhood, which was supported by the Qatari government, were unmistakable. This ideological orientation led to exaggerated accusations in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that Al Jazeera served as a media affiliate of Al Qaeda.
Hyperbolic as such claims were, there was a distinctly anti-American bent to its reportage. The Iraq war, in particular, was portrayed virtually as a campaign of mass murder.
The real problem here was the Janus-faced nature of Qatari foreign policy, contradictory and ultimately unsustainable.
On one hand, the huge American military presence in Qatar is a key element of Qatari security strategy. Centcom largely ran the Iraq war out of its forward headquarters at the Udeid Air Base, which Qatar built to encourage a United States establishment there. On the other hand, Qatar gave a hugely influential platform on Al Jazeera to the Muslim Brotherhood cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who elsewhere preached that “Americans in Iraq are all fighters and invaders” whether they were military or civilian, and that it was “a duty for all Muslims” to kill them. Thus Qatar was indispensable to the American war effort in Iraq and at the same time gave credence to one of the most influential Islamic propagandists against it.
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