Al-jazeera channel in the Arab World - Essay Example

The change process within the Arab media scenario mainly began with the launch of Aljazeera that Aljazeera was launched by the government of Qatar in 1996. Aljazeera gave new dimensions to the Arab news sphere and for the first time the world community witnessed the broadcasting of free expression of thoughts and media courage through any Arab country channel. After the launch of many satellite channels the competition was already became very tough for the government controlled Arab channels after which the Arab countries had to bring some level of liberalization and freedom to their media policies to enable their channel compete the other satellite channels (Nawawy and Iskandar 14).

Aljazeera attained the attention of the people in very short time span working with the lotto of "the opinion and the other opinion". Initially it was a six hour daily news program that was soon expanded to 24 hour news coverage and programs and several separate channels were also initiated by the network like Al Jazeera Live, Al Jazeera Sports etc. (Zayani 98) According to the estimated, ten million people view Aljazeera daily (Lynch 5). Despite the popularity of al Jazeera it has been condemn and criticized on the charges of giving voice to the dangerous and inflammatory views.

It openly broadcasted the messages of many leaders of militant groups in different countries that mostly expressed their messages against the western powers (Nawawy and Iskandar 14). Aljazeera proved to be the first example of freedom of press granted to media in the Arab world. though currently Aljazeera has somewhat lost his grounds in appealing the viewers but till last few years it was the main symbol of freedom of media in the Arab world and one could not overlook the strong influence on Aljazeera upon the Arab media scene.

Many of the news programs and talks shows broadcasted at the Aljazeera remained the centre of attention of the people for several years as people widely viewed this