The American branch of the Qatar-sponsored news network has experienced a series of setbacks, including a spate of firings, a lawsuit by a disgruntled former employee, and allegations of endemic workplace sexism and (unsurprisingly) anti-Semitism. Oren Kessler and David A. Weinberg write about the network’s larger problem:
Al Jazeera Arabic—the flagship of the Al Jazeera conglomerate—has long served as a mouthpiece for Qatar’s Islamist-driven regional agenda. During last summer’s Gaza war, the channel’s coverage seemed taken from Hamas’s own playbook (an unsurprising fact given Qatari support for the terrorist group), describing all Palestinian casualties, whether civilians or militants, as “martyrs.” Similarly, an article from February about last year’s slaughter of worshippers with a gun and a meat cleaver in a Jerusalem synagogue described the killers as “martyrs.”
Al Jazeera is by far the most-watched channel in the Arab world, and Al Jazeera English (the network’s English-language channel for everywhere but America) is available in 140 countries, including every European market.
But the network has never quite found a market in America. It ranked a dismal 104 out of 106 among ad-supported cable channels and, in the first quarter of 2015, averaged only 35,000 viewers. . . . Americans, it seems, simply aren’t buying what Al Jazeera is selling.
Read more on New York Post: http://nypost.com/2015/05/21/call-it-fail-jazeera-network-drowning-in-scandals/