I noticed a good amount of people talking about Al Jazeera in the BBC paywall thread and that make me ask, why!?
It’s not about being exactly more reliable than the other big ones. More about being a second perspective, filling in the gaps of the western ones.
How about you give your supported and and reasoned opinions for why it is an untrustworthy source?
As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.
In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.
Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.
FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.
Trust, but verify.
Imo it’s not about saying this or that org is least biased or less biased, it’s acknowledging the biases present in all news orgs and comparing the reporting from multiple sources.
Al Jazeera is funded by the Qatari government. Make of that what you will.
Even if you don’t like al jazeera, remember they’re some of the few who cover Gaza in person and a whole lot of Africa and other developing nations. I don’t blindly trust them, but many western news agencies are barely reporting on the same thing. If they’re not covering these nations, why are we complaining about one of the networks that do it?
Scepticism should always be applied to any state-run media.
There’s a saying among BBC journalists that all who work there eventually end up at Al Jazeera.
Watch one of my favorite documentaries of all time, Control Room (2004) about coverage of the Iraq War.
Al Jazeera is far from perfect, and I’d argue has fallen from its peak in terms of quality. But it’s still worth viewing to get a more well rounded perspective.
Now do I believe they can cover topics that hit close to Qatari interests? Not necessarily. For those I take with a grain of salt.
Their original staff was a bunch of pretty serious journalists sourced from the BBC.
Can’t speak to anything but Al Jazeera America. Short lived, but they promised unbiased news. And gods was it unbiased, flat as paste. Really woke me up to how I’d come to expect entertainment in my news and not simple facts.
News shouldn’t be entertaining; it should be factual and unbiased.
Its a large organization. There’s Al Jazeera, and then there’s its Al Jazeera English subdivision which operates with widely different team. The latter has a reputation for high quality journalism and has won multiple awards for it - the former exhibits more bias in its reporting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_awarded_to_Al_Jazeera_English
I would say the BBC is no more trusted and should not be any more trusted than AJ English. Each have biases and each are capable of very high quality investigative journalism.
Becuase it was founded with the same journalistic practices as the BBC.
Yes, Al Jazeera is biased. But way less than other news sources in the area, and way better than many large American “news” sources.