Why Al Jazeera America Tanked

Jessica Loudis, a former member of Al Jazeera America’s newsroom, reports on the 2016 downfall of her former employer in this crystal clear and meticulously researched article.

In 1996, the Qatari government launched Al Jazeera news as “a credible, Arab-language news network that was neither foreign-run nor a government mouthpiece”. When a BBC/Saudi attempt to start a channel in Arabic failed, “the Qataris swooped in, hiring 120 laid off journalists and broadcasters”, and lent $137 million to the project.

The original Al Jazeera station grew rapidly in size and popularity, despite harsh criticism of its often polemic and controversial programming. This controversy, in addition to infrastructural quirks of the region and political pressures, combined to keep the network from becoming profitable as planned, and the Qatari administration sunk over another million to keep it afloat.

The English-language version of Al Jazeera launched in 2006 with the goal of tapping into a new market by covering regions of the world little reported about in the West. Costing at least $2 billion and racking up a range of lawsuits, its viewership remained low. A fundamental disjuncture between the goals and politics of the Arab- versus English-language channels contributed to the problem—perhaps more glaring was the challenge of starting a TV station in a digital media saturated world.

And yet the New York newsroom had attracted excellent writers, and the journalism on Al Jazeera’s English-language website was top-notch. “While the organization was conceived to further Qatari influence, in New York it was an earnest leftist agenda that emerged, propelled by the impulse to cover issues routinely overlooked by profit-driven outlets.” Despite the “arcane bureaucracy”, the lack of management gave them the freedom to do great and diverse work.

Loudis writes: “The tragicomic story of Al Jazeera America would be more amusing if it weren’t for all the good journalism it produced.”