It was immediately obvious during the protests in Egypt against Mubarak that something wasn’t right in the media coverage of Al-Jazeera Arabic. While the problems of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen were being given similar-ish treatment, the democracy movement in Bahrain was more or less ignored. The Saudi foreign minister was despatched to Doha on several occasions and the result was that Qatar accepted the argument that the Gulf Cooperation Council countries – or let’s call them the Gulf Arab dynasties – were “different” (that old chestnut khususiyya again), their governments were essentially benign and any protest movement could not be framed as “uprising” or “revolt”. For Al-Jazeera that meant reducing Bahrain coverage drastically. But there was another part of the argument, one that manifests itself in Saudi-owned and Bahraini media: not only were they protests for an unwanted, unnecessary and alien notion of democracy, they were the work of Iranian agents provocateurs with an agenda of Shi’ite supremacy. Saudi Arabia establishes its cordon sanitaire in pan-Arab media. It has been a disappointment to people across the political spectrum seeing Al-Jazeera enter the sheep pen. One assumes this is temporary – there is still no love lost between Riyadh and Doha and Al-Jazeera still strives for credibility – but it will interesting to see how the Bahrain issue affects Al-Jazeera’s approaches to favourites such as Hizbollah, Hamas, Assad’s Syria and Iran itself. A recent Hassan Nasrallah speech was ignored by Al-Jazeera because he attacked Bahrain over its treatment of Shi’ite demonstrators. Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the unrest in Syria has been slow to pick up. But breathless and dubious reports of revolt in Iran remain the province of Al-Arabiya and it’s hard to imagine Al-Jazeera go Wahhabi on us and ditch supporters of Palestinian resistance to occupation and discrimination even if they happen to be Shi’ite or Iranian. In the meantime, turn on BBC Arabic instead.
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