David Marash who was the American face of Al Jazeera English has an interview where he explains his decision to leave. I find his naivitee about Al Jazeera a bit disconcerting. Still here’s his identification of the point where AJE stopped being “objective” or “transparent.”
DM: I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice President Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the possibility of action against Iran. And instead of getting acquiescence, the United States got defiance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basically went off on their own and the first sort of major breakthrough on that was the Mecca agreement, which defied the American foreign policy by letting Hamas into the tent of the governance of the Palestinian territories. This enraged the State Department and was one crystal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off campus, was off on its own. And it is around this time, and I think not coincidentally, that you see the state of Qatar and the royal family of Qatar starting to make up their feud with the Saudis, and you start to see on both Al Jazeera Arabic and English a very sort of first-personish, “my Haj†stories that were boosterish of the Haj and of Saudi Arabia. And you start to see stories of analysis in The New York Times where regional people are noting that Al Jazeera seems to be changing its editorial stance toward Saudi Arabia. I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.
I don’t necessarily read this as Marash blaming the administration, though I suppose it could be read that way. It does make me wonder why the United States spends so much effort trying to make nice with the Arab world when it’s clear that the Arab world doesn’t much care for us.
Incidentally this contradicts Marash’s earlier claims that the English at the station were more anti-American than the Qataris. (Maybe that’s true, but it was suggested that it was the Brit anti-Americanism that alienated him.)
Related thoughts from the Jewish Press.
Crossposted at Soccer Dad.
