Al-Jazeera In America

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Media Bias: Journalists who went berserk after two U.S. industrialists announced an interest in the Los Angeles Times are cheering the launch of a cable news network funded by a repressive Arab government. Go figure.

 

Let's see if we can make sense of recent events in the world of journalism. When libertarian-supporting billionaires David and Charles Koch said a few months ago that they might want to buy the Los Angeles Times, half of the paper's staff members said they'd quit if the deal went through.

 

The mainstream press went similarly apoplectic when Rupert Murdoch decided to buy the Wall Street Journal a few years back. And it routinely bashes Murdoch's Fox News as an illegitimate source of news.

 

Yet these same folks think it's just peachy that Al Jazeera launched its cable news network in America on Tuesday after buying up the remains of Al Gore's failed Current TV.

 

[SrWoodchuck]

Al Jazeera America ‘first born child’ of the Left’s Marriage to Islam http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/57324

 

While unsuspecting societies were fighting Same Sex Marriage in the West, vowing ‘til’ death do us part’, the far left and Islam had run off and eloped.

 

The far left and its compliant mainstream media contingent reached out a hand to bring Al Jazeera all the way from Doha, Qatar headquarters into American front rooms—starting this afternoon.

 

Al Jazeera America begins broadcasting today. The network once called ‘Osama bin Laden’s network’ is being sold to American masses as “14 hours of straight news everyday, hard-hitting documentaries, correspondences in oft-overlooked corners of the country. And fewer commercials than any other news channel.” (New York Times, August 18, 2013)

 

The ‘bin Laden network’ is not a far stretch from an Obama one, and many wonder how long it will take Obama to replace his late night show appearances with Al Jazeera.

 

In hard economic times, Al Jazeera is launching with a staff of 900, including 400 newsroom employees.

 

They’re making it sound virtuous that they only devote six minutes per hour for commercials:

 

“It has cast its lower commercial load—about six minutes an hour, compared with more than 15 minutes an hour on another (sic) news channels—as a perk for viewers. “Not cluttering the news with commercials,” Mr. Al Shihabi said after a studio tour in New York on Thursday. (NYT)

 

“It sounds like something a journalism professor would imagine. In actuality, it is Al Jazeera America, the culmination of a long-held dream among the leaders of Qatar, the Middle Eastern emirate that already reaches most of the rest of the world with its Arabic-and-English news channels

The list of media personalities who have thrown in their lot with the Arab network includes John Siegenthaler, David Shuster, Soledad O’Brien, Antonio Mora, Joie Chen, Michael Viqueira and Ali Velshi.