My Final Assessment of Al Jazeera

Writing and researching about this publication was incredibly educational because I had barely heard of or interacted with Al Jazeera before this class. I think this says more about me and the need to broaden the international journalism that I read rather than saying anything about the organization because they do some really great journalism.

What fascinated me the most about Al Jazeera overall is their history, which in some ways was pretty bloody, and how far they have come. They were originally just a talk-show network that was breaking barriers by discussing things such as conflict and religion. These topics were not allowed by the state media organization and Al Jazeera changed the news landscape for so much of the Middle East.

Furthermore, the fact that they were hit with American missiles on two separate occasions, one of which lead to the death of one of their reporters, was really shocking to me because I had never heard of these events. We hear stories all the time about American journalists going over to the Middle East and getting harmed or killed by rebel fighters or terrorists but we never hear about Americans going into the Middle East and killing their journalists. Even after being targeted by America, Al Jazeera persevered in their coverage. In fact, they were one of the only publications with people on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2008 and 2009.

They had also come so far in terms of their coverage, specifically their digital coverage. They are now an international news organization covering stories in every country you can think of that might have news, which I find incredibly impressive. They launched Arabic and English websites in 2001 and 2002 respectively which is pretty early on when you look at the adoption of the internet for other large publications. Below you can see the beta versions of these websites when they were first launched.

There is so much rich history in the Al Jazeera network and I loved learning about it. Covering their publication made me read more news on other countries that I would not necessarily see with the other publications I subscribe to which made me realize how much world news I am missing out on by reading primarily American publications. The fact that none of it is behind a paywall is also amazing because they are giving out so much access to a plethora of information.

I will continue to read Al Jazeera after this project since they are so accessible via their app and social media accounts. For anyone looking for what is basically unlimited world coverage, they should be one of the first publications to look to because they report outside of the American-centric or even Euro-centric bubble that we can become stuck in.