TA3BEER

Al Jazeera worked hard over the past decade to shed the image of ‘the voice of the terrorists’ along with the obvious negative connotation that it brought with it to become a credible news agent for the ‘other’ dialogue in Arabic and in English for Western media. Evidence of a successful revamped image is the fact that Al Jazeera has become the ‘go-to’ news network for many officials in Washington DC including the White House and the State Department. Secretary Clinton has been quoted saying that people in the United States are turning to Al Jazeera for real news and the United States has nothing to compete with it; “You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock”. This may already be irking those who see this growing influence as a problem.

But what surprised many including myself—an avid Al Jazeera English and Arabic viewer—is that Al Jazeera Arabic was not the first to break the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. A good seven minutes passed since CNN interrupted their regular Sunday night programming to inform their audience that President Obama will make a statement from the East Room before Al Jazeera even posted a breaking news alert. Granted, it was unexpected for a Sunday night and assuming that the White House alerted the American media before alerting global news networks.

A valid fear that has been lurking these past few days is that someone will step up and will take leadership of Al Qaeda and once again will use Al Jazeera to broadcast their messages. CNN’s Anderson Cooper publicly denounced showing any videos or messages from Bin Laden (it is rumored one was made to air after his death) on his show or any show he is associated with, calling him “a mass murderer who should never be heard from again”. But in an era where social networking websites played a major role in bringing down two Arab leaders in the past few months of 2011, it is possible that Al Qaeda will go down the digital route—although the risk of leaving a digital trace to their whereabouts makes it highly unlikely.

Al Jazeera worked hard against the stereotypes and Western media accusation of being the voice of Al Qaeda, but we might see the world go back to square one if they become the only news network that accepts showing of Al Qaeda’s messages. All is uncertain right now with the war on terror and what does the death of Osama Bin Laden mean to Al Qaeda as an organization—but one thing is for certain, the world media has its eye on Al Jazeera to see if it will remain true to its new revamped image of credibility or if they will go back to being the outlet for Bin Laden’s anticipated postmortem message and new messages from his disciples.

By K. Ali