Hugh Miles
Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World
Pbk published January 2005 by Abacus at £10.99
ISBN: 0 349 11807 8
It’s Osama bin Laden’s network of choice. Saudi Arabia has accused it of ‘serving up poison on a silver platter’. When the Bush administration failed to shut it down, they decided to blow it up, and its correspondents have been killed, locked up in Guantanamo Bay, and tortured in Abu Ghraib.
With more than fifty million viewers. Al-Jazeera is one of the most widely watched news channels m the world. And it’s one of the most controversial. Set up by the maverick Emir of Qatar. Al-Jazeera (‘the Island’ in Arabic) quickly became a household name in the West after September 11, by delivering some of the biggest scoops in television history, including airing a taped speech from Osama bin Laden. Lambasted as a mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda, its journalists have been accused of spying for everyone from Mossad to Saddam Hussein - sometimes simultaneously. Now Hugh Miles uncovers the true story behind one of the worlds most influential media outlets.
The channel has so often been at the eye of the storm in recent years that its story mirrors all the upheavals in a troubled region - from the inside. AI-Jazeera, Hugh Miles reveals, may have shown the United States how much it is hated by Arabs, but it has also done more to educate the Arab world about democracy than any nation - or indeed notion - of the democratic world.
About The Author Hugh Miles was the winner of The Times Young Journalist of the Year award in 2000. born in Saudi Arabia, he was educated in Libya and studied Arabic at Oxford and in the Yemen. He has written for the London Review of Books, the Sunday Times and the Guardian.
Hugh Miles
Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World
by Hugh Miles at Amazon.co.uk 