Ask Lemmy

A pretty long track record of high-quality journalism. Same as the BBC.

Sure, they're owned by Qatar. As of last I checked it serves as more of a status symbol than a propaganda outlet, though, at least in English.

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?

Why wouldn't they?

It's hard not to interpret this comment in a western chauvinistic light.

You need to receive news from a broad variety of sources, not just those that agree with your viewpoint or have a particular agenda.

Al Jazeera obviously have a pro-Qatari but less so than Fox News for example or any billionaire owned newspaper/TV channel have biases.

Aggregate from all sides and the truth will be somewhere in the middle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Their original staff was a bunch of pretty serious journalists sourced from the BBC.

Becuase it was founded with the same journalistic practices as the BBC.

Does anyone have a link to the bbc paywall thread?

I'm not sure I consider them a trustworthy source per se. I don't think they're necessarily less trustworthy than the BBC. BBC is propping up a Western colonialist perspective. (Not trying to beat up on the Beeb specifically. Major trusted U.S. news sources tend to more specifically support U.S. nationalism ... even the "liberal" ones.)

I think if a viewer / reader in a Western mindset, the difference in the blind spots between Al Jazeera's perspective and Western media will complement each other in a way that will give readers / viewers a more well-rounded perspective on history. At least as compared to sticking only to Western perspectives.