Figure 1 Al Jazeera news model and its matrices
Throughout all the stages Al Jazeera has gone through during the past 25 years, it has encountered various challenges and as it sought to promote its new media culture and consolidate this news model. It was not always easy to implement this culture. Al Jazeera has been subject- ed to restrictions and various forms of resistance by a number of politi- cal operatives in the East and West alike since the beginning. Most of the time, “the Arab governments declared war against Al Jazeera”, as the researcher Olfa Lamloum argues (1) . Ever since the channel’s launch, the Qatari government and the network’s manage- ment have received many complaints, and Al Jazeera’s bureaus have been shut down in many Arab countries. Moreover, its broadcast signal has been disrupted, and the phones of its journalists were hacked. This was because its news approach, maintained field proximity to news, topics and issues that were meant to remain silenced. Therefore, Al Ja- zeera “came into conflict with all the political rulers in the Arab world that used to restrict freedom of expression and deprive media outlets
(1) Olfa Lamloum, Al-Jazira: Miroir Rebelle et Ambigu du Monde Arab (Paris: La Décou- verte, 2004), p. 20. See also Mohamed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar, Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (Boulder: Westview Press), 2003, p. 114.
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