Few in U.S. See Jazeera’s Coverage of Gaza War

[Scurrilous]

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"Last June, Al Jazeera English produced a report from Gaza about a young couple who were preparing to marry during the relative calm of the cease-fire between Hamas and the Israeli government, a time when they could finally shop for furniture and, as the reporter put it, let themselves “dream that a happy life together is within reach.”

Now that reporter, Ayman Mohyeldin, a former CNN producer, can be seen with a helmet and flak jacket answering questions from an anchor back in the studio in Doha, Qatar, describing the Israeli bombing and ground campaign in Gaza intended to stop Hamas missiles from being fired into Israel.

In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

There are six reporters in Gaza, two working for Al Jazeera English and four working for the much larger and more popular Arabic version of the network, which was created in 1996 with a $150 million grant from the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. Al Jazeera describes itself on the air as "the only international broadcaster with a presence there."

While getting to the story has not been an insurmountable problem for Al Jazeera English’s journalists — they are, in effect, surrounded by it — getting their reports to the English-speaking public has been a bit trickier. The network is largely unavailable in the United States, carried only by cable providers in Burlington, Vt.; Toledo, Ohio; and Washington, D.C. (In Burlington, the local government last summer rejected public calls for the city-owned cable provider, Burlington Telecom, to drop the channel.)

By contrast, Al Jazeera’s English-language service can be seen in over 100 countries via cable and satellite, according to Molly Conroy, a spokeswoman for the network in Washington.

Recognizing that its material from Gaza will have influence in the United States only if it is highly accessible online, Al Jazeera has aggressively experimented with using the Internet to distribute the information it has gathered."

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[Scurrilous]

1. Israel's Gaza op draws large American audience to Al-Jazeera

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"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.

But the viewers weren't watching it on television, where the Arab network's English-language station has almost no U.S. presence.

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 Web site Twitter to provide real-time updates."

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"Overall, the station's Web video stream saw a 600 percent jump in worldwide viewership during the Gaza offensive - and about 60 percent of those hits came from the United States, according to the station's internal numbers.

Outside figures also point to big gains in U.S. online interest, suggesting the war gave the Arab station its first significant chance to break into the American market.

Traffic to Al-Jazeera's main Web page, which includes both the English and Arabic sites, spiked once Israeli airstrikes began on Dec. 27, according to Amazon.com Inc.'s Alexa Web tracking site.

Those figures show the share of Internet users visiting the site shot up about 22 percent over the last three months, with most of the gains coming since the start of the Gaza conflict.

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."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1058473.html

[slipslidingaway]

2. Just because our news is so censored it does not mean that

the rest of the world is not seeing the destruction in Gaza.