ing on Al Jazeera’s screens, especially after the governments con- cerned refused to use their right to appear on its programmes and express their views. Had they done that and told their side of the story, their presence would have definitely made the coverage more balanced. Al Jazeera has always reiterated its commitment to objective reporting of events, but continuous live coverage of the protests may have created some sort of sympathy with Arab peoples at a time when they aspired to change their conditions and establish democracy. Foreign Policy defended this idea and remarked that, “Journalism purists in the West may object to the idea of news organisations overtly helping to foster revolutions. However, the history of American journalism is replete with media activists: Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Adams, to name a few. The state of politics in the Arab world today has much in common with the 18th-century America; the same is true of its journalism (1) ”. Fifth, Al Jazeera reported the slogans that were being chanted in Tunisia then in Egypt, adopting a gradual approach to events as they developed on the ground. First, it called them protests , then uprisings , and finally revolutions, as they became nationwide and involved all sectors of society. After the fall of presidents, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (January 2011) and Hosni Mubarak (February 2011), Al Jazeera was there to broadcast the festivities of the Tu- nisian and Egyptian peoples. In Egypt, Al Jazeera had a special experience as it covered the revolution in an unusual way, beyond anything known in the TV industry, including at the international level. After the Egyptian authorities banned the channel, shut down its office, and seized its equipment, Al Jazeera had to rely almost completely on new media to continue its coverage. In doing so, it firmly established ‘citizen journalism’ as an innovative means of reporting and deployed this technique across Egypt. Although some images were low resolution as they were shot by ordinary citizens with semi or non-professional equipment, they, nonethe- less, played an important role in capturing those historic moments
(1) Lawrence Pintak, “The Al Jazeera Revolution”, Foreign Policy , (2 February 2011). https:// foreignpolicy.com/2011/02/02/the-al-jazeera-revolution/ (accessed 15 November 2020).
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