Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
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.
