and its proximity with government officials. In so doing, Al Jazeera shifted the focus from the source to the news itself and reset the agenda from prioritizing ready-made government-centred content, to a news agenda in which the audience and its interests come first. It seems that this shock-and-provoke approach, which means to shock the audience with a new media discourse and challenge its previ- ous convictions by provoking a new thought, was necessary to help the viewers open their eyes on an alternative media content. In return, the reaction of Arab governments varied from softly criticising the channel and banning it from operating in their countries, to adopting a more ag- gressive and hostile stance. Al Jazeera’s coverage of two major events between 1996 and 2001 explains how the shock and provoke approach works: the 1998 Operation Desert Fox and the 2001 war in Afghanistan. During the 1991 US war in Iraq, codenamed “Operation Desert Storm”, Al Jazeera did not exist yet. The Arab audience was then left with a completely, unchallenged, American narrative. The Arab audi- ence was following and receiving news, images and press conferences from only one prevailing source – CNN. Despite being the party most affected by the war, the Iraqi or Arab voice was largely absent. How- ever, Al Jazeera’s coverage of Operation Desert Fox in 1998, which coincided with the second anniversary of the Channel, represented a shift in international war reporting. Al Jazeera’s live coverage provided the Arab audience with an Arab perspective to the 4-day military cam- paign, from 16 to 19 December. The fact that, for the first time, the Arab audience followed live coverage by Arab reporters on an Arab screen, creating an Arab narrative, was unprecedented. Viewers of Al Jazeera started to understand the nature of the entirely air and naval military campaign by US and British forces against an Arab country, under the pretext of destroying weapons of mass destruction. In this campaign, U.S. forces launched more than 400 Tomahawks, i.e., more than the total number of missiles launched in the 2-week 1991 Operation Desert Storm (1) . Al Jazeera’s coverage of the military operation allowed Arabs to discover a new aspect of war reporting, the conflict of media narra-
(1) Parts of Al Jazeera’s narrative about the continued missile strikes on Iraq despite U.S. re- ports claiming that the campaign ceased on the first day of Ramadan, can be seen on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=somM_a7-Z4E/
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