Nonetheless, the dearth of distribution in the United States means that the dispatches from Mr. Mohyeldin played exclusive videotape of what appeared to be a Hamas sniper’s killing of an Israeli tank commander the reporter repeatedly cautioned that what was being shown could not be independently confirmed. Officials like Vice President Dick Cheney and the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, said the network’s reporting was inflammatory, irresponsible and frequently misleading.Īnd in Israel, where news media commonly quote from material on Al Jazeera, the network is frequently criticized for inflaming the Arab public by running unfiltered and out-of-context videotape showing blood and gore in battle zones.Īl Jazeera’s coverage of the Israeli military campaign from Gaza includes reports on civilians killed and made homeless by the attacks as well as on clashes between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops. The near-total blackout in the United States is no doubt related to the sharp criticism Al Jazeera received from the United States government during the initial stages of the war in Iraq for its coverage of the American invasion. If we can make some money that is great.” “We don’t have the direct commercial pressures that others have. “Part of our mission, our mandate, is to get our news out,” Mr. The Twitter feeds are also streamed onto Al Jazeera’s English Web site.Īnd unlike purely commercial broadcasters, Al Jazeera does not have to accompany its new-media strategies with revised new-media business models. During the weekend, there were more than 4,600 followers, not including the many more who view those short messages, called “tweets,” online. Recognizing that its material from Gaza will have influence in the United States only if it is highly accessible online, Al Jazeera has aggressively experimented with using the Internet to distribute the information it has gathered.įor example, Mohamed Nanabhay, the 29-year-old executive who established Al Jazeera’s new-media group, beginning in late 2006, said that Al Jazeera planned to announce this week that all its video material of the war in Gaza would become available under the most lenient Creative Commons license, which basically means it can be used by anyone rival broadcaster, documentary maker or individual blogger, for example as long as Al Jazeera is credited.Īl Jazeera said that since the war started the number of people watching its broadcasts via the Livestation service has increased by over 500 percent, and the views of videos on its YouTube channel have increased by more than 150 percent.Īlso, Al Jazeera has created a Twitter feed on the “war on Gaza,” which provides frequent short messages that refer the public to new material that can be viewed online. (In Burlington, the local government last summer rejected public calls for the city-owned cable provider, Burlington Telecom, to drop the channel.)īy contrast, Al Jazeera’s English-language service can be seen in over 100 countries via cable and satellite, according to Molly Conroy, a spokeswoman for the network in Washington. The network is largely unavailable in the United States, carried only by cable providers in Burlington, Vt.
While getting to the story has not been an insurmountable problem for Al Jazeera English’s journalists they are, in effect, surrounded by it getting their reports to the English-speaking public has been a bit trickier.
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