The former Bush administration had accused Al-Jazeera's Arabic station of anti-American bias. None of the biggest US cable systems carries Al-Jazeera English, claiming viewer interest is not sufficient. The station says only three small cable operators offer the network in Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. Since Al-Jazeera English went on the air in November 2006, it has struggled to gain a spot on traditional American airwaves. The jump in viewership reflects wider trends in global media, where the Web increasingly is the place where viewers go to watch video and social networking sites and citizen journalism are merging with traditional news coverage.Īl-Jazeera English and Arabic are both bankrolled by energy-rich Qatar, a US Arab ally that also supports the militant Hamas rulers of Gaza and which recently suspended its low-level ties with Israel to protest the Gaza offensive.įeisty and sometimes graphic coverage of global carnage is an Al-Jazeera specialty, as is bracing commentary that has shaken up the Arab world and rattled the West. Those figures show the share of Internet users visiting the site shot up about 22% over the last three months, with most of the gains coming since the start of the Gaza conflict. 27, according to Inc.'s Alexa Web tracking site. Traffic to Al-Jazeera's main Web page, which includes both the English and Arabic sites, spiked once Israeli airstrikes began on Dec.
Outside figures also point to big gains in US online interest, suggesting the war gave the Arab station its first significant chance to break into the American market. Overall, the station's Web video stream saw a 600% jump in worldwide viewership during the Gaza offensive - and about 60% of those hits came from the United States, according to the station's internal numbers. "Having reporters in Gaza - which others did not have - that's what made Al-Jazeera stand out and that's important on the Internet," said Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at the City University of New York and writes about media on his blog.
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Israeli TV focused mostly on Israeli casualty reports and Hamas rocket barrages. "There is an alternative perspective our channel provides, and Gaza was a good example," Burman said.Īl-Jazeera had another draw: Its reporters were inside Gaza while international television networks such as CNN were barred by Israel from sending reporters in throughout the entire war. was a breakthrough opportunity to make an impact with people who are less aware of Al-Jazeera than we'd like," said Tony Burman, managing director of the English-language channel in Qatar. The images, viewed widely across the Mideast, generated enormous sympathy for Gazans in the Muslim world.
Instead, the station streamed video of Israel's offensive against Hamas on the Internet and took advantage of emerging online media such as the microblogging website Twitter to provide real-time updates.ĭuring the 22-day conflict that ended last weekend, the station and its Arabic language sister, as they often do, aired far more graphic pictures than US networks of dead and injured Palestinian children and women. American viewership of Al-Jazeera English rose dramatically during the Israel-Hamas war, partly because the channel had what CNN and other international networks didn't have: reporters inside Gaza.īut the viewers weren't watching it on cable television, where the Arab network's English-language station has almost no US presence.
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