roads from Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah to besieged Nablus in the northern West Bank. What would have been a forty-minute ride by car, turned into a six-hour journey on donkey back, through mountainous trails. The camera and other photographic equipment were carried on another donkey. The two accompanying photographers had to travel that distance by foot (1) . Subsequently, the team succeeded in the deliv- ering the first field coverage from a city cut off from the outside world. 3. The Professional Code of Conduct in Balance In her book, Satellite Realm, Naomi Sakr reveals that Arab gov- ernments had shown their dissatisfaction with Al Jazeera’s programmes and news coverage at a very early stage. As early as October 1998, the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU) decided to deny membership to Al Jazeera. Sakr quotes minutes from a meeting held by the Arabsat Coordination Committee in Amman during the mandate of Pierre Daher in which he said that to qualify for membership, Al Jazeera had to con- form to the ‘code of honour of the Arab media’, adding “it could re-ap- ply for membership in six months” (2) . In fact, the Committee provided a convenient mechanism for outlawing a certain type of programming, described by one of its members as a type that ‘takes a stance against our culture and background’” (3) . Soon, however, the governments’ hard feelings towards Al Jazeera began to take the form of punitive mea- sures affecting its critical work. In November 1998, Jordan shut down the channel’s bureau in Amman and terminated the accreditations of its correspondents after an episode of Al-Itijah al-Mu’akis (the Opposite Direction) about the Wadi Araba treaty. Similarly, at the end of 1998, Kuwait suspended Al Jazeera’s operation on the grounds that an Iraqi guest verbally attacked its Emir during his participation in a talk show. Later on, in mid-1999, it banned the channel altogether, withdrew its permits, and urged Kuwaitis not to appear on its programmes. The series
(1) Miles, Al Jazeera , pp. 77-78.
(2) Sakr, Satellite Realms , p. 162.
(3) This statement came in a summary of a paper delivered by Hassan Hamed before the 19th Conference on Satellite Media in the Middle East and North Africa, held on 20 February 1999. Quoted by Naomi Sakr, Satellite Realms , Ibid.
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