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Qatari poet Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami was sentenced to life imprisonment for insulting the emir
Al-Jazeera TV’s coverage of the Arab awakening and wider Middle East politics is likely to come under the microscope following this week’s purchase of former vice president Al Gore’s Current TV network.
“While al-Jazeera is celebrating its U.S. plans, it faces tough questions about its coverage and whether it is as independent of Qatar’s autocratic ruling monarchy as it claims to be,” writes the FT’s Michael Peel. “The broadcaster is partly funded by the government of Qatar, and the country’s increasingly prominent political role in the region’s turmoil has intensified scrutiny of al-Jazeera’s coverage.”
Qatar has come under criticism for funding illiberal actors, including ultraconservative Salafist militants, during the Arab uprisings while suppressing fundamental freedoms at home.
“With the Arab Spring, al-Jazeera’s reach and credibility have grown in the West,” said Jane Kinninmont, a senior research fellow in the Middle East division of Chatham House, the London-based think tank. “But certainly, it has become more criticized in the Arab world – or, at least, become seen as more politicized.”
“Although the popular revolts that swept the Arab world and brought down regimes from Tunisia to Yemen have presented al-Jazeera with an extraordinary opportunity to expand its audience, they have thrown up growing problems of perception,” notes Peel:
Critics say Islamist movements with which Qatar has tried to achieve good relations have received over-sympathetic attention, with airtime given to wild allegations that opponents of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, are agents of foreign powers. Some observers say al-Jazeera is cautious about reporting sensitive stories in Qatar, such as the fire at a Doha nursery last year that killed 13 children and six adults, although the channel denies it was slow to cover the tragedy. …The Qatari authorities sentenced a poet [above] to life imprisonment in November for insulting the emir in a widely-circulated work about the Arab Spring that criticized the “repressive elite”.
“Al-Jazeera is generally a free network, but it works within the political constraints as understood in Qatar,” said Michael Stephens, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute Qatar think tank.
