The Fall of Al Jazeera America
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
When Al Jazeera America was announced, the Qatari
propaganda network was riding high. Once known as a
dump for Al Qaeda videos, the Arab Spring had
allowed the House of Thani to project its power
across the region, toppling governments and
replacing them with its Muslim Brotherhood allies.
Qatar
had been notorious for its ties to Al Qaeda, but
those connections had done little for the oil-rich
oligarchy. The Muslim Brotherhood however handed
Egypt over to Qatar. And Al Jazeera’s propaganda had
been widely credited with supplying the images and
messaging that made it happen.
Qatar’s key Arab Spring asset however had been in
the White House. Mubarak would not have fallen if he
had retained the support of the President of the
United States. Nor would Gaddafi have been toppled
or Assad have come under so much pressure without US
military intervention or the expectation of it.
Al Jazeera America was going to be the final
building block allowing the House of Thani to
brainwash millions of Americans and influence
foreign policy directly at the source. It was a
grandiose dream for a tyranny that was increasingly
living beyond its means while playing a dangerous
game of empires.
Qatar had become the dominant voice on the Middle
East in Washington D.C. The takeover of Gore’s
left-wing Current TV would enable the totalitarian
regime to launch a news network that would build on
its existing relationship with the American left
which saw the mainstream media as not biased enough.
How hard could launching a successful news network
be?
Al Jazeera might have been riding high in the early
days of 2013, but its comeuppance was already on the
way. A few weeks after its announcement, the
protests against its man Morsi began to take off. By
the time AJA launched, Morsi had already been
toppled and Al Jazeera propagandists would find
themselves behind bars for their part in Qatar’s
Brotherhood coup against the Egyptian government.
While Al Jazeera portrayed them as journalistic
martyrs, one of the most notable arrestees, Mohamed
Fahmy, sued Al Jazeera for endangering him by acting
as “an arm of Qatar’s foreign policy” that “was not
only biased towards the Muslim Brotherhood — they
were sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
These were all obvious facts that were being ignored
by the mainstream media which dismissed Al Jazeera’s
critics as ignorant Islamopohobes. But even as its
Muslim Brotherhood allies were losing in Egypt,
Tunisia, Yemen and Syria, Al Jazeera America would
come under fire from its liberal media pals.
Al Jazeera America had made the media an offer it
couldn’t resist. The leftists who flocked there had
anticipated employment at a vanity network
subsidized by the House of Thani that would let them
do unfiltered left-wing advocacy without caring if
they ever got any viewers or made any money.
It was enough that Al Jazeera appeared to share
their hostility to America and Israel.
Their journalistic instincts did not lead them to
ask why a foreign government would be interested in
funding their journalistic fantasies or how Muslim
tribal leaders could be considered progressive.
Or how they could manage to run a modern news
network.
Al Jazeera America had been a disaster from the
start. Its $500 million buy of Al Gore’s Current TV
had been expensive but considered worth the price to
get access to a huge number of cable households
through Gore’s sweetheart deals with big cable
companies. But the cable companies knew the
difference between Al Gore and Al Jazeera and they
wanted that oil money Qatar was throwing around.
So did Al Gore.
Gore had initially protected Al Jazeera by
accusing cable companies who wanted to drop it of
Islamophobia, but then turned around and sued Al
Jazeera when it backstabbed him by using millions of
dollars of his money in a slush fund to pay cable
channels for airing its propaganda.
The House of Thani was forced to dig deeper to get
Al Jazeera America into as many homes as possible,
but it still wasn’t getting any actual viewers. Its
average daily ratings of 13,000 viewers were less
than half the already miniscule 31,000 viewers of
Gore’s failed Current TV project.
Qatar had paid $25,000 per viewer and with some
nights registering a zero in the demo, recouping
that money through advertising was not a realistic
business plan.
And then things got even worse.
Al Jazeera America’s biggest hit was “Real Money
with Ali Velshi” with 54,000 viewers. Those were the
kinds of ratings usually associated with cable hits
like the deceased FOX Soccer Channel, but that was
as good as it got for Qatar’s $500 million
investment. And like all good things at Al Jazeera,
it wouldn’t last.
Al Jazeera wasn’t just owned by a bigoted inbred
dictatorship where everything works through
nepotism; it was also run that way. Ehab Al Shihabi,
its CEO, went to war with Velshi just before his own
firing after the media began widely reporting on
just how badly Al Jazeera America was being run.
Ehab Al Shihabi had not just burned through billions
of dollars on a failed project; he had also burned
through the mainstream media professionals hired to
give the Qatari propaganda news network a friendly
American face. Al Jazeera America had brought over
CBS’s Marcy McGinnis to serve as Senior Vice
President of Newsgathering, but she resigned blaming
Al Shihabi. Her departure was part of a pattern of
senior female personnel leaving or being forced out
at the Muslim news network. Joining her was
Executive Vice President of Human Resources Diane
Lee and Public Relations Senior Vice President Dawn
Bridges.
Al Jazeera America’s leadership had been built
around Muslim men and Western women. The Western
women were experienced news veterans while the
Muslim men often had no real qualifications for the
job. Behind the press releases, Al Jazeera America
was run much like Qatar or Saudi Arabia where native
Muslim nepotism hires bully and humiliate the
imported Western executives who do the real work.
But Al Jazeera America was not operating in Qatar
and it needed to draw on a talent pool from two
groups that its bosses harbored a pathological
hatred for; women and Jews.
The crisis at Al Jazeera America first went public
when mainstream media outlets began reporting on a
lawsuit by employee Matthew Luke which claimed that
Osman Mahmud, the Senior Vice President of Broadcast
Operations and Technology, had engaged in sexist and
anti-Semitic behavior.
Mahmud had reportedly stated, “Whoever supports
Israel should die a fiery death in hell.” Further
emphasizing the links between Al Jazeera and the
Muslim Brotherhood, he had also ranted that, “The
enemies of Muslims in Egypt, their puppets and blind
supporters are due to face death in the hospitals
and streets of Egypt.”
Since then the news network has been in free fall,
battling lawsuits and bad publicity. It’s a failure
that has been building for a while, but it took
Qatar’s abuse of fellow news organization friends
and colleagues for the mainstream media to begin
legitimately reporting on it.
Qatar’s old wall of silence has come down. From its
FIFA corruption to the mass death of guest workers,
some of its dirty laundry is finally being aired.
The media is still reluctant to talk about its role
in the Arab Spring or the Qatari weapons smuggling
operations in Libya and Syria conducted with Obama’s
complicity. Those are areas where their own
progressive project too closely intersects the
Islamist one.
The
media was burned by Al Jazeera, but that doesn’t
mean that the leftist-Islamist alliance is dead.
Al Jazeera America however is a monumental disaster
that cost billions of dollars while doing very
little. The news network was doomed from the start.
Cable news is a slowly dying industry that is being
killed by the internet. Spending a fortune to launch
a new cable news network that no one wanted was a
stupid act of arrogance that only a backward Islamic
tyranny or Al Gore would be capable of.
But it was a testament to Qatar’s hubris that its
rulers were convinced that they could draw large
American audiences in a country where its brand is
mainly associated with Osama bin Laden videos. It
was this same hubris that led Qatar to overextend
its support for the Muslim Brotherhood leaving it
isolated and hated by its own neighbors.
The Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera America were
undone by their own hubris. There’s a lesson there,
but Qatar’s arrogant rulers aren’t likely to learn
it.