Al Jazeera under the gun. Who will stand up for freedom of information?
Many of my American journalist colleagues have worked for Al Jazeera—the Arab media outlet based in Qatar which opened its doors in 1996. It gained prominence for being one of the early sources of news from Iraq.
Now Al Jazeera finds itself in the news.
Israel has now ordered the local offices of Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite news network to close while also confiscating broadcast equipment, preventing the broadcast of the channel’s reports, and blocking its websites—all for 45 days. For now, the order does not pertain to Gaza and the West Bank.
Regardless of what you think of Al Jazeera’s reporting, closing a major media outlet during a war has dangerous consequences for all of us.
When I went to Iran for ABC News “Nightline” in 1987 to set up a live interview with then-President Rafsanjani as a news producer, I arrived to find our satellite truck had been shut down, allegedly by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. I will never forget thinking—what happens if information is dead?
Freedom of the press is something we all take for granted. Journalists, including Al Jazeera staff, risk their lives to bring us news and information. When Shireen Abu Akleh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, was killed during an Israeli raid in the West Bank in 2022, it was the beginning of a ramp up of attacks on journalists in the region.
That was followed by a December Israeli strike inside Gaza that killed, an Al Jazeera cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, and wounded the channel’s bureau chief and others.
Today, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists — at least 97 journalists and media workers have been killed since Oct. 7 covering the war.
Especially in chaotic times, we value the fundamental tenet that information is like oxygen—we need it to breathe. Without it, we live in dark corners—cut off from the realities of life on the ground in places we cannot be.
Despite charges of “bias,” Al Jazeera has become the most widely watched television network in the Arab world—revolutionizing the way citizens understand a difficult part of the world and surviving many attempts to ban it in parts of the world.
In the search for fully “independent” or “impartial” news, the truth is that it is hard to find any of it today, in a world driven by clicks, baits and recycled reporting. With Al Jazeera—we know what we are getting: Reporting that is financed by an Arab state that, at times, has an anti-U.S. bias and always an anti-Israel bias. OK. If you know, you know. It has been reliable and remains additive to the mix of news and information in a crowded marketplace.
Restricting Al Jazeera’s ability to operate in Israel also risks undermining any progress on the ceasefire talks taking place in Egypt. Qatar is not popular right now with the Biden administration for its continued hosting of Hamas, and failure to deliver a positive response on pausing the war and releasing more hostages. The U.S. has told Qatar to evict Hamas if they stand in the way of a deal with Israel.
(Qatar has said it will continue to play a role as an honest broker, according, ironically to Al Jazeera.)
But Qatar has been a valuable partner of the United States—serving our interests in bridging conversations with Hamas when we need that. And it does finance this major news outlet with often a light touch.
The last point to wrestle with is Israeli behavior. Trying to control media is often a tactic of non-democratic nations and Israel is proving that it is not a democracy, in the sense many Americans define the word. We must accept that its system is not what we think.
As a parliamentary system, Israeli governing rules are different from our own. Its politics are tribal with everything from far-right extremism to liberal progressives, and it is does not have the kind of checks-and-balances that the U.S. system affords. It also happens to have, at this moment, a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who behaves more autocratic than democratic. It is not surprising that he would go after the fourth estate.
What happens next matters. Will Israeli citizens stand up for freedom of information and demand less censorship of the war? Will the U.S. administration stand up for freedom of the press? And will we, as journalists, keep writing and demanding that news is vital and cannot be cut off simply because its reporting offends a government? I will.
Tara D. Sonenshine is a senior nonresident fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University