Al Jazeera Tells its Story: In-Depth Studies

policy is still maintained by Al Jazeera satellite channel (Arabic), while Al Jazeera English gives more airtime to the global audience. 2. The Advantages of Geographical Location and Diversity of Sources Like any TV channel in the early years of its foundation, Al Ja- zeera’s news coverage relied on a mixture of images and news dis- patched from its correspondents. This was in addition to the news wire copies received from the two largest news agencies, Reuters and the Associated Press. Hence, the images used on screen were a mixture of Al Jazeera exclusives and those provided by the agencies and shown on international TV networks. During the founding phase, Al Jazeera’s correspondents “mostly worked from the bureaus of international news agencies such as IPTN. Their offices operated as private production companies” (1) . When the channel started to set up its own bureaus during the launch, priority was given to the region where its targeted audience is based and where the flow of daily news would mainly come from. Accordingly, the first bureaus the channel opened were those in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Gaza and Baghdad. Then followed the opening of bureaus in other Arab and Islamic countries, starting with Iran and Pakistan (2) . The fact that the channel is headquartered in the Middle pro- vided it with easy access to those areas, which automatically gave it an advantage over many other international news networks. Researchers, who studied the significance of Al Jazeera’s geo- graphical location, pointed out to the advantages its journalists had from it, and the implications of belonging to the environment in which they report news stories. Shawn Powers believes that, by choosing to establish its headquarters in Doha, Al Jazeera had “cultural and tactical advantages in covering news from the region. Not only could the net- work’s reporters better understand local cultural norms, and thus make connections to get access to stories and better connect to local audienc- es, but at times they were simply closer to the action, meaning reporters

(1) Ibrahim Hilal, “Managing the newsroom”, Ibid, p. 345.

(2) Zayani and Sahraoui, The Culture of Al Jazeera , pp. 64-65.

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