Al Jazeera and global news: stages of operation

From its inception, audiences in the Arab world have paid attention to the Arabic‐speaking Al Jazeera news network, which aimed to be different from the start. Journalism and media scholars, who have focused on Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA), have tended to present it as a democratizing influence in the mediated Arab public sphere. This is no surprise given the nature of the discourses it tackled that were not previously openly discussed on any Arab media platform. Since then, Al Jazeera (AJ), as an organization, has taken many twists and turns, but remains a controversial player in the region, as this chapter will discuss.