Posts tagged al jazeera
How Brand Identity Affects Perceptions of the News
William Youmans and Katie Brown, PhD candidates at the University of Michigan, have published a fascinating paper on how Al Jazeera English is viewed in the United States.
In their study, they showed 177 participants a news clip [above] of “the Taliban’s position towards peace talks.”
The first group watched the original clip with AJE’s branding…
…The second group saw the same news piece re-edited to carry CNN International’s (CNNI) logo…
…The third group, the control, viewed no clip. We then asked participants in each group to rate, in general, how biased they thought AJE and CNNI were.
Watching the AJE clip — branded as AJE — did not seem to have an impact on perceptions of bias; bias ratings were equal between those in the AJE-clip-watching group and the control group.
But in the group that had just watched the clip with fake CNNI branding, participants rated CNNI as less biased than those in the control group.
Paper (PDF) | Arab Media Society | Nieman Lab
Youmans and Brown go on to discuss AJE’s difficulty breaking into the US cable market, saying the issue is part politics and part perceived market potential.
Al Jazeera in Talks With Comcast, Time Warner | Fast Company
Al Jazeera English may be coming to American television screens. The Qatar-based network is currently in talks with cable giants Comcast and Time Warner, creating a groundswell of enthusiasm among American news junkies and a collective groan from right-leaning conservative activists. At the moment, Al Jazeera English is only available on a handful of local cable outlets in Washington, D.C., Burlington, Vt., and a few other locales.
Hillary Clinton: ‘America Is Losing’ An Information War That ‘Al Jazeera Is Winning’
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary Clinton said that an Afghan general once told her he thought all Americans men were wrestlers, and all American women were strippers, because that was all he had seen in media depictions.
Clinton said that while Arab, Chinese and Russian media are effectively selling their cause around the world, America is cutting back, and losing the critical information war.
The world’s connected, part 304,378: Kashmiri cartoonist Malik Sajad sends this cartoon of unrest in the Middle East to Al Jazeera English.
The Future of Online Video?
GigaOm’s Josh Levy outlines the promise and difficulty Web video is having in the American media landscape.
While writing about how Roku, a set-top box that lets you stream Web video to your television, added Al Jazeera English so that users could watch the Egyptian protests, cable providers are fighting against consumer ability to cut the cord.
Roku’s move was a thrilling taste of what online TV might look like if big cable loses its grip on channels and viewers. Imagine if more channels, sick of waiting in virtual holding pens to be allowed to join cable lineups, instead just joined up with Roku or one of its competitors. And then imagine if viewers followed these channels off the cable reservation, cut their cords and relied solely on little Internet boxes for their TV content.
It would be a shiny future for online video. Except the cable giants won’t stand for it, and are using all their power to stop it: The cords that pipe in your cable TV also deliver the Internet, and big cable is all too eager to exploit that fact, threatening to throttle or block content they don’t like or that competes with them.
Independent online video efforts are running into problems left and right, and the cable giants are trying to stymie them for as long as possible while they test out their “TV Everywhere” offerings — which is their attempt at rolling out online video services without allowing subscribers to “cut the cord.” Thanks to loopholes in a recent FCC decision, there are a number of ways Comcast and friends could degrade or throttle Netflix, Hulu and other channels offered by Roku.
It’s true that with more innovations like Roku’s addition of Al-Jazeera English, the future of online video could be bright. But if big cable succeeds in squashing competition and stifling innovation, it could also get really, really dark.
We’ve noted a few times the struggles Al Jazeera English has had entering the US market.
The above graphic comes from the Twitter Media blog in which they explain how AJZ is using Promoted Tweets to effectively turn the platform into a new kind of television distribution system.
Al Jazeera is using Promoted Tweets to a) report the news; b) position itself as the authority on this story; and c) drive viewers to its live stream. The result? Twitter is one of the top referrers to a site that’s seen a 2,500% jump in traffic since January 25.
According to Riyaad Minty, head of social media at Al Jazeera English, the @AJEnglish team is operating their Promoted Tweets campaign just like a news desk.
As stories pick up steam—for instance, word gets out that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is about to make another statement—the team tweets relevant information and promotes it, making sure it’s ready and waiting if and when “Mubarak” becomes a Trending Topic and Twitter users click his name, looking for more information. (Remember, the the Washington Post did something similar on Election Day 2010.)
It’s worth reading the entire post to learn about AJZ’s strategy and how they and other publishers are harnessing topics to drive audiences to their coverage.
The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video — even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives…
…That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience. We see the Middle East on television only when it flares up and then generally in medium or long shot.
Staring down governments that want to monopolize information in the Arab world, however, is hardly new to Al Jazeera. At this moment, though, I question whether this is exactly what has also happened to Al Jazeera English in America. There, too, we are almost completely shut out.
That’s quite concerning, as the U.S. media market rests on sturdy democratic principles, namely the First Amendment and the freedom of expression. But ever since Al Jazeera’s English channel first sought to broadcast in the States, roadblocks have marked every turn.
Perhaps the most subversive anti-Western propaganda news network Al Jazeera has ever created. Sophisticated and sinister, it succeeds not because it unleashes a frontal assault, but because the nature of wealth inequality, debt and the costs of war are laid out in a cartoonish mockery of the status quo. Accompanied by the theme song from Tetris, this definitely looks like it would be a fun video game to play. Oh wait…
Al Jazeera Moves to Crowdsource
Al Jazeera’s broadcast signal’s been blocked, some of its equipment confiscated and the Internet itself is still down in Egypt but the news organization is calling on bloggers and citizen journalists to submit information and media through its site.
Egypt Crackdown on Al Jazeera Gives Upper Hand to Scrappy News Network
The news that the Egypt has revoked Al Jazeera’s license to broadcast has rippled across the world, further demonstrating the desperation of a government under siege.
The Doha, Qatar-based network, which operates semi-autonomously from its funders, the Qatari royal family, has emerged as perhaps the strongest voice in the uprising, save that ofthe Egyptian people. The government’s move today to censor Al Jazeera is nothing if not a recognition of their position of strength, and the government’s inability outflank or outmaneuver journalists.
The story of how a satellite cable network became a feared opponent of an oppressive regime says a lot about our times, but it was by no means an accident.
Via GigaOm:
[P]art of the puzzle is obviously that Al-Jazeera has its base of operation in the region. But the fact that so many people seek out Al-Jazeera’s English-language online feed also has to do with the unique history of the network. Al Jazeera intended to make significant inroads in the U.S. news market when it launched in late 2006. It hired a number of high-profile reporters and anchors, including David Frost and the former U.S. Marine Josh Rushing.
However, the news network couldn’t gain a foothold in the U.S. cable market. Comcast, Time Warner and Cablevision all declined to carry the channel.
Hurt feelings and pressure from the Bush administration may have been to blame, writes GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers. However, an organization as scrappy, and well-funded as Al Jazeera would not be held back.
Without access to the majority of TV households, Al-Jazeera turned to the next best thing: the Internet. I did an interview with Russell Merryman in 2007, when he was working as the editor-in-chief of web and new media at Al-Jazeera English. Merryman told me a big part of embracing new media was an attempt to win over the hearts and minds of Americans, and he quoted from a review that called Al-Jazeera “the best cable news channel Americans can’t watch” as an early proof of success for that strategy.
Al-Jazeera embraced YouTube early on for daily news clips, and soon after, opened a 24/7 live feed on Livestation. The network also more recently embraced Creative Commons licenses for some of its raw footage, and Nanabhay said it will make some of Friday’s footage from Cairo available under a Creative Commons license.
In addition to a prevalent anti-American, anti-Israel bias in the network’s news reports—which may not come as a surprise to many—Robert Worth and David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times recently wrote that Al Jazeera has seen its role transform from broadcaster to instigator during the winter of discontent.
Yet Al Jazeera’s opaque loyalties and motives are as closely scrutinized as its reporting. It is accused of tailoring its coverage to support Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza against their Lebanese and Palestinian rivals. Its reporter in Tunisia became a leading partisan in the uprising there. And critics speculate that the network bowed to the diplomatic interests of the Qatari emir, its patron, by initially playing down the protests in Egypt.
Al Jazeera was at first thought to be dragging its feet to cover the swelling tide of anger that flooded the streets of Egypt’s cities beginning on January 25. However, when it did again train its cameras on the Egyptian protesters, it did so with the typical aplomb.
Setting aside political leanings, Al Jazeera’s coverage of the contagious rebellion that has swept through the Maghreb, has been aggressive, courageous and compelling, setting a high bar for other media outlets. Furthermore, the decision to release some of its Egypt footage with a Creative Commons license is almost certain to make Al Jazeera the outlet of record for this seminal event.
How important is it that Egypt has censored Al Jazeera and restricted Internet and SMS access to to stanch the flow of information? It has been variously noted that people who are bored or restless will naturally congregate in the streets, adding bodies to the jittery mass of protestors.
Maybe keeping the lines open is a better option, since what is happening on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and elsewhere in Egypt is no secret.
With streets empty of law enforcement in many Egyptian cities, and with the Army playing the role of passive observers, it seems that the day belongs to Al Jazeera, as much as the Egyptian people, even as a last effort is made to silence both.
Egypt shuts down Al Jazeera bureau “The Al Jazeera Network strongly...
Egypt shuts down Al Jazeera bureau
“The Al Jazeera Network strongly denounces and condemns the closure of its bureau in Cairo by the Egyptian government. The Network received notification from the Egyptian authorities this morning.
Al Jazeera has received widespread global acclaim…
A small group from computer-assisted reporting and interactive news, with advice from the investigative unit and the legal department, has been discussing options for creating a kind of EZ Pass lane for leakers.
Bill Keller, Executive Editor, New York Times, discussing the possibility that the paper will create an anonymous WikiLeaks-style submission system for would-be leakers.
Note: Al Jazeera currently has a system like this in place called Transparency Unit.
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