Abstract
For this look at Al Jazeera English (AJE), Philip Seib, professor of journalism and public diplomacy at the University of Southern California, has drawn together authors remarkable for their knowledge and insights, who are also notable for their distinctly different academic backgrounds, positions, and the passions they bring to their work.
Anyone familiar with the topic will recognize these scholars’ names—such as el-Nawawy or Gilboa—but that is not to say all of them are gray eminences. The collection presents work by scholars who know what they are writing about, whatever rank they are, and wherever they are to be found. The result is a book that is well worth reading and one, in which the authors themselves brought into a room might have a spirited debate.
Shawn Powers, of Georgia State, provides an interesting and well-done review of the history of the channel’s creation and development, which opens the book. In the second chapter, Hussein Amin, of the American University in Cairo, considers the shape and reach of AJE’s global footprint. In the next chapter, Tine Ustad Figenschou, from the University of Oslo, considers the nature of the channel’s news content, providing a rare and detailed analysis of whether the channel was living up to its commitment to cover news from the Global South and to extend its reach to sources beyond the normal elite familiar to Western global news consumers.
Will Youmans, of George Washington, reviews the challenge AJE executives have faced getting the channel on the cable lineups available to mainstream American audiences. Amelia Arsenault, of Georgia State, and Michael Kugelman, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, explore AJE’s experience covering and reaching into Africa and South Asia, respectively. Both find that the channel’s efforts have been challenged by conditions on the ground, including among them issues with demand, distribution, and audience access.
El-Nawawy, at Queens University of Charlotte, provides a qualitative analysis of AJE’s coverage of the Ground Zero mosque controversy—coverage that he finds was notably balanced and conciliatory in a climate where most mainstream media coverage of the story was neither. The book ends with Seib’s effort to pull from all the chapters that came before to make sense of the whole.
The most significant chapters in the book, however, are the opposing viewpoints offered of AJE’s coverage of events in Gaza in 2008-2009. The Palestinian viewpoint is provided by Rima Najjar Merriman, of Al Quds University, and the Israeli viewpoint is provided by Eytan Gilboa, of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
To say they are significant is not to say that either is perfect, for these are the chapters where passion is most evident and where the scholarship is most likely impacted. Merriman’s chapter tends to catalogue coverage of Palestinian stories and in their presence find quality. Gilboa, on the other contrary, is intent on finding fault—and one almost gets the sense that any theoretical framework would have done as well for the author—there was nothing AJE could have done right. In both cases then, the author’s method tends to raise questions.
However, if one sidesteps the passion, both chapters also offer a chance to get both facts and insights not often available at a distance. One comes away with the sense that somewhere between the two approaches might be a more balanced reality—something of which is, in fact, offered by Figenschou. But what these chapters have that is missing from most media scholarship is intensity and fervor generally held back from scholarship, but at the same time, they also bring intense personal knowledge.
This volume should find its way onto the desks of anyone seriously interested in the development of contemporary international news flows, AJE itself, or the development of news coverage in the Global South. It is a reasonable read for master’s or doctoral-level classes, and certainly advanced-level undergraduate classes might gain from reading some of the chapters. However, one would be advised to read the book before assigning it.
The book is very well edited, and the fact that there are so many authors—which sometimes causes problems for younger readers—would not be an issue here. Those interested in peace journalism will find el-Nawawy and Gilboa both applying models developed in earlier research by el-Nawawy and Powers to very different results.
The collection was going to press during the first months of the uprisings that became the Arab Spring. Youmans’ piece takes into account the role AJE online played in providing American audiences with access to news of the events in North Africa and the Middle East as the uprising spread west from Tunisia. The careful crafting of other pieces in the collection mean that they are not so much hurt by the time of their publication, as that AJE’s role in and impact on events since publication now call for a second volume.