They don’t really have any regular Africa-specific shows. They do cover African stories in their news bulletins, probably much better than most. That is when they’re not reporting on Gaza, which (understandably) dominates their coverage at the moment.
And @captaincupcake I agree, some of that coverage has been horribly biased. I particularly dislike how they call the hostages held by Hamas as ‘captives’. I don’t know, it’s like they’re trying to almost pussyfoot around Hamas? Yet anything Israel does is referred to in the strongest possible terms.
I think that’s exactly it. Very broadly generalising, I imagine the sort of person who would go and work for Al Jazeera in the first place is probably more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than most. Couple that with Qatar hosting Hamas leaders - and I am not for one minute conflating the cause of ordinary Palestinians with that of Hamas and other armed groups - and you can see how this might result in biased reporting. Though it’s not all biased, I must stress! There are many good reasons why one would lean pro-Palestine, even just on a humanitarian level. But I don’t think you’d ever see the BBC or CNN acting like Al Jazeera does.
This is how it is for most international news though. Most every day people don’t want to hear about International wars every single day for months on end unless there are major developments and are more interested in local news. With the Israel/Gaza situation there was a lot of coverage in the beginning and there still is coverage when there are major developments. However that’s just the nature of our commercial media.
I still think the coverage has been significantly more than other wars or recent major conflicts. Ask most every day Aussie what’s happened in places like Syria, Yemen, Sudan or Myanmar in recent years. They probably wouldn’t know much but would know something about this conflict. In my view if people think this deserves more coverage then what’s happened or is happening in most of those places should too.
The coverage of this conflict has definitely been much more comprehensive in local media than many other comparable conflicts. I do feel in part that this is because, unlike those other conflicts, the Palestinian movement has managed to mobilise wide international support and the conflict is spilling over into other countries, such as here with the protests and encampments, and the increases we’ve seen in anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic behaviours in the community as a consequence.
There’s been no such protests or significant outpourings of support for victims of conflicts like those in Sudan or Myanmar, hence they are pretty much ignored.
Aside from Al Jazeera being controlled top to bottom by the Quarti government who are a key ally of both Tehran and Hamas, it should never be purported that the ordinary Palestinian people have actual say in what their “representatives” do, let alone real power. They don’t have weapons or explosives and thus have no power.
Some of the coverage is so wilfully deliberate in ignoring that the only people that “they” are helping are terrorist groups or reactionary Islam ideollogues that it is as the Germans say: unvergessen und unbegreiflich.
Wall to wall celebratory coverage of today’s developments in Gaza. With 200+ Palestinians killed, 4 hostages retrieved and reports of hostages killed.
How is this coverage going to age? What other circumstance would an event involving the deaths of hundreds of innocent people be met with such jubilation? Seems irresponsible considering how the facts are barely known.
Mr J.: do not forgot that we rarely hear from the Palestinian people themselves – just the PLO/PIJ/Hamas/Hezbollah terrorists and Islamists and Nasserites who have the guns/bombs and as Mao tse-Tung said, “power comes from the barrel of a gun”.
Didn’t it turn out that civilians (including an Al Jazeera reporter) were holding hostages in their homes?
Hamas holding innocent Israeli civilians (for 8 months) initiated the current conflict, they keep holding them so the blood isn’t just on Israel’s hands. We usually see it from the Palestinian side or the Israel side depending on who is reporting but both sides need to take some responsibility in this.
I often wonder… do we actually think that any other Government would respond differently if their own citizens were kidnapped? Maybe not with such heavy force but I think a lot of governments would have a very strong response if their citizens were kidnapped.
Carter should have mined the Persian Gulf and strangled Iran’s economy. – four decades is a long time to live with letting yourself and your country be humiliated and degraded by thuggish clerico-fascists.
That’s getting pretty close to Hamas’ justification for Oct 7. Israel abducted and indefinitely held thousands of ‘administrative detainee’ Palestinians without charge or right to a trial, many of them children.
We don’t need to theorize what other governments would do. There have been Australian hostages taken in Africa, Iran and Myanmar. Most notably Jocelyn & Kenneth Elliot, the situations are dealt with diplomatically or with targeted operations. At no point is killing 38,000 people on the cards to retrieve them.
Deadline has spoken to several BBC insiders and people close to the British broadcaster to test the tumultuous atmosphere eight months into a devastating period of fighting between Israel and Hamas. These conversations reveal how unrest has spilled over into a bitter employment dispute, tense meetings, and what insiders described as “egregious” letters to BBC management.
“The most moral army in the world” ages like milk as every day goes by, that none of the Western media is covering this is a stark, silent approval of what is happening.
We found the human shields that Israel keeps telling everyone about, what they left out is they’re the ones using them:
Interestingly this is backed up by Israeli sources too (I must confess to being slightly skeptical at first given The New Arab is Qatari owned and as such liable to the biases that come with that ownership).
As this horrid affair has dragged on, it seems that the IDF and Israel more broadly has squandered most of the goodwill that was there after those horrific events on October 7.
The wider Palestinian movement has definitely done a great job of mobilising social media and allied and sympathetic groups in support of their cause, and been done a great job of glossing over and downplaying the role and actions of one of their own (in Hamas) in triggering this situation (i.e. the events of October 7).
The Netanyahu government however has made some very poor decisions too which may well threaten Israel’s ongoing existence- especially as the conflict drags further and further on (such as the above allegations which I am reasonably confident have a basis in truth having been validated from both Israeli and Palestinian sources), and have handled media relations pretty poorly (and this has let the Palestinian side take control of the narrative).