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Sunday, December 20, 2009

Al Jazeera - getting more critical of Qatar?

This is a video I have only just stumbled across, although it is not exactly new.

What I found interesting about it, though, is not so much the story but the veiled criticism of Qatar and the Gulf States. It's particularly interesting for us at the moment, as we are working on an article exploring just what we can and can't say on the Qatar net.



Al Jazeera has been criticised in the past for not criticising Qatar, and this could be part of a deliberate attempt to be more balanced.

The Emir himself has said that the channel should be independent, even when the ruler who sponsors it disagrees with the content (see middle of the video below for the relevant content - unfortunately the content is repeated several times!):


After several years here, I am starting to get more surprised over what has not been censored than what has been censored. Thousands and thousands of threads (if not hundreds of thousands) have been posted on QatarLiving.com, many of which have been critical of Qatar or which have discussed religion, and only one has been censored over the last four years.

And I've yet to hear of a blog being censored..

Sadly, what is censored is often done so by mistake - Qtel seems to block many useful sites for web developers. Surely this is through error rather than by design?

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