took a new turn in 2006. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden re- vealed the U.S. National Security Agency hacked the Network’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) early in March 2006. The leaks reported the Agency had access to the internal correspondence (s) of Al Jazeera’s journalists and Directors and was able to spy on their content. The agency declared Al Jazeera was among a group of institutions that were hacked and found to be rich in intelligence sources. (1) 4. Al Jazeera Dodging the Gatekeeper In addition to fostering new media trends, Al Jazeera’s cover- age did not win the Arab governments’ admiration. These govern- ments had for decades been a devoted, staunch, and stubborn defender of the “gatekeeper” theory, and extensively making use of whatever tools their underlying authoritarian power involves (2) . The gatekeeper is someone, “who controls a strategic position in the communication chain”. Because of that particular position, the individual becomes the decision-making authority as to what passes through the gate and how it reaches its target audience. In this way, the gatekeeper plays a dual role: to control what is being published and what is being banned, most- ly according to government agendas. Since its launch, Al Jazeera has been a real challenge to the gate keeper theory on two fronts. On the one hand, it provides alternative narratives of what is being published, regardless of governments’ agendas, and on the other hand, it keeps what is being banned accessible to the audience. In so doing, Al Jazeera presents a different model that fits well with the “uses and gratification” theory, which is more compatible with media freedom principles (3) . Af- ter a decade, this theory in turn evolved into the theory of democratic participation, focusing on the needs, interests, and hopes of the public that receive media content (4) .
(1) Snowden Archive, “Efforts against Virtual Private Networks Bear Fruit”, The Intercept , (March 2006): https://bit.ly/332T4JO/ (accessed 22/11/2020).
(2) Hisham Rushdi Khairallah, Lectures on Media Theories , (Menoufia University Press [n.d.]), p. 114.
(3) Ibid, p. 102.
(4) Ibid, p. 147.
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