at the forefront of the global news landscape, academic studies have witnessed an essential turn towards comparative studies.
3. Global Footprint and Comparative Studies Al Jazeera’s rapid evolution has seen it transform from a regional channel that addressed a limited Arab audience, to a worldwide media phenomenon. This new global status motivated many researchers to shift from descriptive approaches to comparative studies that included many Arab and world media. In this context, the scope of compari- son varied from regional to global, and some researchers even chose to compare the Network’s own channels. Examples of these studies in- clude research on Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English channels (1) , others compared between Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English websites (2) , and be- tween Al Jazeera America and AJ+ (3) . This pattern of academic study tends to be more specific compared to the generalisation that characterised the early “exploratory” studies. (1) Abeer Alnajjar, “How Arab is Al Jazeera English? Comparative Study of Al Jazeera Ara- bic and Al-Jazeera English News Channels”, Global Media Journal , Vol. 8, No. 14, (January 2009(. Aaron Davidowitz, The Evolution of Media in the Arab World: A Study of Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera English (PhD thesis, Union College, 2008). Alia Daoud, Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: A Comparative Study of Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic Coverage of the Syrian Refugee Crisis (Master thesis, Auckland University of Technology, 2019). (2) Mohamed Satti, “Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English Websites: Agenda-Setting as a Means to Comparatively Analyze Online News Stories”, Communication & Society , Vol. 33, No. 1, (January 2020). Shahira Fahmy and Mohammed Al Emad, “Al-Jazeera vs Al-Jazeera: A Comparison of the Network’s English and Arabic Online Coverage of the U.S,-Al Qaeda Conflict”, International Communication Gazette , Vol. 73, Issue 3, (2011). (3) Emy Osorio Matorel, “From the Failure of Al Jazeera America to the Success of AJ+: A Case Study”, Research paper presented at UNESCO Conference , Pontificia Universidad Jave- riana, Colombia, (2016).
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