Track Record and Controversies
Al Arabiya was started in response to Qatar's pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, but has languished behind in audience popularity surveys, according to reports by University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami. Al Arabiya has been criticized for being an arm of Saudi foreign policy, or what the United States would term public diplomacy, as it is seen as being part of "a concerted Saudi attempt to dominate the world of cable and satellite television media in the Arab world and steal the thunder of Egypt." Over the past couple of years several journalists and editors have been dismissed because of their coverage; In 2011, Al Arabiya fired Hafez Al Mirazi for criticizing the channel’s coverage of the Egyptian uprising while in 2009 Courtney C. Radsch lost her job the day after publishing an article about safety problems on the national Emirates airline.
Al Arabiya had been banned from reporting from Iraq by the country's interim government in November 2004 after it broadcast an audio tape on November 16 purportedly made by the deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi government had also banned the channel on 7 September 2006 for one month for what it called "imprecise coverage".
On 14 February 2005, Al Arabiya was the first news satellite channel to air news of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, who was one of its early investors. On 9 October 2008, the Al Arabiya website (www.alarabiya.net) was hacked.
On 2 September 2008, Iran expelled Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau chief Hassan Fahs. He was the third Al Arabiya correspondent expelled from Iran since the network opened an office there. On 14 June 2009, the Iranian government ordered the Al Arabiya office in Tehran to be closed for a week for "unfair reporting" of the Iranian presidential election. Seven days later, amid the 2009 Iranian election protests, the network's office was "closed indefinitely" by the government.
Al Arabiya is reported to be referred to as "Al Abraiya" (proper transliteration: al-ʻibrīyah) by Saudi religious conservatives, which means "the Hebrew " in Arabic.
Read more about this topic: Al Arabiya
Famous quotes containing the words track and/or record:
“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
—Harriet Tubman (1821–1913)
“Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. He had the vision and the talent to make a pop record that contained the whole world.”
—Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949)