Egypt Bans Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera English reports that Egypt shuts down Al Jazeera bureau
The Egyptian authorities are revoking the Al Jazeera Network’s licence to broadcast from the country, and will be shutting down its bureau office in Cairo, state television has said.
“The information minister [Anas al-Fikki] ordered … suspension of operations of Al Jazeera, cancelling of its licences and withdrawing accreditation to all its staff as of today,” a statement on the official Mena news agency said on Sunday.
In a statement, Al Jazeera said it strongly denounces and condemns the closure of its bureau in Cairo by the Egyptian government. The network received notification from the Egyptian authorities on Sunday morning.
“Al Jazeera has received widespread global acclaim for their coverage on the ground across the length and breadth of Egypt,” the statement said.
An Al Jazeera spokesman said that the company would continue its strong coverage regardless.
There is nothing dictatorships dislike more than the truth, so this wasn’t unexpected, especially following the Internet and cell phone shut downs. The excuse is always to prevent the “terrorists” from organizing, but the reason is to prevent people from finding out what is actually occurring.
I would note that all of the international media I read have mentioned this shut down, but the US corporate media do not seem to have noticed.
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The U.S. corporate media noticed, but Al Jazeera makes them look like lapdogs to power, so they pretend Al Jazeera doesn’t exist.
– Badtux the Lapdog-hating Penguin
Yeah, they were quick enough to “encourage” cable companies not to carry the feed. There was a time, long ago, when CNN did reporting like this, but no longer.
Here’s the live stream if you want it
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/
I’ve been watching the feed on and off for days. They are shifting things around and adapting as best they can, which is still better than anything in the US media.
It is sad that younger Americans have no idea how really good US news reporting once was, and I’m talking about newspapers and broadcast news before CNN was launched. We were once an informed nation.
I have been quite impressed with their technological agility and dedication to their responsibility to the public.
Our media has violated all our individual rights to be informed citizens IMHO.
I watch as our wars wage on and I am reminded quite frequently how families sat silent, perched on the edges of sofas and chairs or knelt on bended knee before the TV watching news reels for the faces and listening for the voices of friends and loved ones serving in Vietnam. Somber. Saddened. Respectful. Now, the loss of lives in war zones is acknowledged on a silent scrolling text at the end of a program, if at all.
In America today, few in the news business (for it is a business, expected to be a profit center for its network) seem to understand that effective reporting requires an adversarial relationship with the government reported on. Without that tension, we have things like unattributed or weakly attributed quotes, whose sources are upper level government officials who have intimidated reporters into fearing they will lose their source if they insist on attributed quotes. It’s yet another way in which our government is now able to operate in secret in aspects that never were or should have been secret before. Now that this has become the standard, I have no idea how it can be fixed. Calling for reporters with bigger balls won’t accomplish much if anything.
Well, Ame, they operate primarily is some of the most repressive areas on the planet, so they certainly have a “standard operating procedure” for being banned, or even blown up, as has happened to them. I assume they bought their equipment with these problems in mind, and got the extra-cost ability to switch frequencies on satellites and to re-aim their antennas as required by local conditions. The US uses stuff that requires a semi, and these guys can operate with a Toyota Hi-Lux.
They have a lot of good talent because of the policies of the repressive regimes, which has created a very large pool of well-educated, under=employed university graduates. Many of their reporters know exactly what the young people on the street are thinking, because that’s where they came from.
Steve, the nepotism and “old boy network” in the US media has made it “safe” and arthritic. No one will take chances, and who you know is more important than what you can do. The media isn’t going to challenge the government, they sit on the same boards and are members of the same PTAs. Getting combative could cost you your country club membership.
In Egypt, the government needs policemen to ban al Jazeera. Here in America, our government merely need whisper to their cronies in the cable companies, “al Jazeera would be bad for business”, and the dirty deed of banning al Jazeera is done. Oh, not completely — there is YouTube and the WWW, after all — but close enough from most people’s perspective.
Was it you who had the story about the Soviet official who was given a tour of Washington D.C., was proudly presented with copies of the NYT and Washington Post, and then upon reading them excitedly asked his hosts, “How do you get them to print only the officially sanctioned news without secret policemen to enforce it”?
– Badtux the News Penguin
They didn’t need the police for al Jazeera, Badtux, when a small cable company on Statin Island tried to carry it in response to subscribers requests the Tea Party types and local media were all over them. The difference between American thugs and Egyptians thugs, is that the government has to pay the thugs in Egypt.
I didn’t have that one, Badtux, but the self-censorship that goes on the US is disgusting after the time I spent in Spain under Franco and Greece under the Colonels, as well as a few other places I never was and can prove that I never was there with official government paperwork. You have people dying to print the truth around the world, but it will never get printed in the US.
During the dying days of the Soviet Union I had access to official English-language translations of Pravda (i.e., those done in the Soviet Union by the official translators). What was interesting to me was how much those reporters managed to fit between the lines about what was *really* happening in the Soviet Union. I suspect that if I read Russian, I would have seen even more there.
Sadly, the only thing I can read between the lines of most U.S. “reporting” nowadays is “I’m reporting what they pay me to report, my paycheck didn’t bounce, all is well.”
— Badtux the Journalistic Penguin
Oh, yes, I read Pravda, Izvestia, Krasnaya Zvezda, and others constantly scanning for open source information, and there were language shifts that contained a lot of humor that definitely wasn’t supposed to be there. A favorite was using standard propaganda phrases in inappropriate settings. Censors see the phrases and ignore the rest of the sentence.
Krokodil was a humor magazine, and those guys got away with almost everything, because the bureaucracy didn’t take it seriously.
Today in the US, the “journalists” believe the propaganda, they want to be known as “heroes of the People’s Labor” and “Stakhanovites” [and receive regular paychecks, so don’t rock the boat.]