ber four (4) appointed the following six board members of the Qatar Public Satellite Channel Corporation (1) :
1. Sheikh Hamad Bin Thamer Al Thani (President) 2. Mahmoud Abdel Aziz Al-Sahlawi (Vice President)
3. Khalaf Ahmad al-Mana’i (Member) 4. Hussein Abdullah Jafar (Member) 5. Abdel Wahid Abdullah Fakhro (Member) 6. Mohammed Jasim Al-Ali (Member)
The board members held their positions in addition to their main work or career. The second article of the law specified that members would serve for three years (2) . When the Idea Became a Reality The Al Jazeera experience was a risk by all definitions, especially for the team overseeing the construction of the channel’s buildings and facilities, because there was no pre-existing pattern to follow. Engi- neer Hussein Jafar says, “Satellites were a fairly new thing to us …we learned that our previous work differed from what we were doing at Al Jazeera…we were like students who learn something new every day at school. Making the Al Jazeera idea a reality included several paths, including the selection of a place to establish the infrastructure. A num- ber of building engineers were tasked with this, and they were given instructions to choose any place in the country that they saw fit” (3) . Jafar in 1996. See this link for the law: https://bit.ly/36Xnuh7. (1) Loay Bahry made two mistakes with regard to the board of directors. He said there were 7 board members, and that the board was established based on a decree from the Qatari Council of Ministers. See Bahry, Ibid. , p. 89-90. Abdulkarim Ziani repeated these mistakes in his PhD thesis, see Zayani, Ibid. , p. 33. (2) The news of forming the “Satellite Channel’s Council” was published by the Qatari news- paper Al Raya on its front page on 22 April 1996.
(3) Hussein Jafar personal interview, Ibid.
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