Amid low viewership, the Qatar-owned TV network Al Jazeeera America is cutting back its staff and programming, The New York Post reported on Monday.
The cable outfit told staff on Friday it’s canceling both its morning news report and “Consider This with Antonio Mora” at 11 a.m. It’s also scrapping its 4 p.m. news hour and pushing its 6 p.m. coverage an hour later to 7 p.m. …
Al Jazeera America has plugged much of the day with a news feed from its overseas sibling, Al Jazeera English, sources said. Several former employees told The Post they believe that was the plan all along.
The news of the cuts come on the heels of the leak of a controversial e-mail from a producer at the network calling on its anchors and correspondents to play down last week’s terror attack on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, as an attack on free speech.
When Al Jazeera America started broadcasting in August 2013, it boasted that it would deliver a “hard-hitting brand of journalism,” but was dogged by questions about its independence from the Qatari government. The network quickly hurt its credibility by interviewing a conspiracy theorist.
Al Jazeera America previously cut its staff and programming in August as it celebrated its first anniversary of broadcasting.
In Qatar’s Rise and America’s Tortured Foreign Policy, Jonathan Spyer observed:
From 2011 to 2013, it looked like the alliance between Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood was about to emerge as a major Middle Eastern power bloc. In early 2013, the movement held power in Egypt and Tunisia. The Syrian rebels looked set for victory, having taken control of much of Aleppo and broken into the eastern suburbs of Damascus. Qatar’s enormous wealth, deriving from its extensive natural gas reserves, was financing all of this. And its influential Al-Jazeera channel was celebrating it.
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