cluded Al Jazeera’s coverage of Arab events, most notably the Pales- tinian cause, serves as a crucial reminder of how developed the Arab political awareness is when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is how researchers have found Al Jazeera to be responsible for build- ing and putting into action new political and intellectual propositions across the Arab world. In so doing, Al Jazeera’s power has always been its ability to influence and engage with its larger audience (1) . Third: the affiliation and change equation After the shock and provoke equation led to the process of knowl- edge and shaping, Al Jazeera’s relationship with its audience further developed into a sense of affiliation, leading to change. In other words, this phase is the outcome of the interaction between the previous two phases, where Al Jazeera’s choices met the demands of its Arab audi- ence. This structural approach clarifies how far the demolish-and-con- struct strategy affected the relationship between Al Jazeera and its au- dience across two decades. Al Jazeera sought to demolish the state of dependence and dispossession the Arab audience was living under as far as the situation with the state-run media and authority was concerned. This resulted in a transition into a state of self-awareness building to cope with, and engage in a process of political change. This process culminated in the Arab Spring as a form of political and social change (2) . It is the realisation phase of the political and media editorial identity as adopted by Al Jazeera since its inception in 1996. With the underlying and intertwining public choices of the audience, their drive was centred around revolution against autocracy as a way of sociopolitical libera- tion. The perspective adopted by Al Jazeera in covering the Arab Spring, in which citizen journalism had a significant contribution, moved the relation between the Network and its audience to a more advanced state. The anti-Al Jazeera camp, composed mainly of a few Arab govern- ments, found in that open and ongoing field coverage, new grounds to
(1) Ibid, p. 72.
(2) Hazem Saghieh, The Prolonged Collapse…The Historic Background of the Arab Middle East Uprisings , (Beirut: Dar Al-Saqi, 2013), pp. 17-18.
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