Al Jazeera live stream back on RNW website

Due to the ongoing situation in Libya, RNW is again providing a live stream of Al Jazeera English. You can watch Al Jazeera, which also includes a live Twitter feed. Having watched Al Jazeera extensively in recent days, I can highly recommend its coverage for a more in-depth analysis and less repetition than I have seen on other news channels. An RNW correspondent (whose name we cannot publish for safety reasons) is also reporting from inside Libya.

Al Jazeera has published comprehensive country-by-country information on its worldwide satellite frequencies and full details of carriers on cable and ADSL. All the details are on this page of its website.
(R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)

Al Jazeera live feed from Doha: http://www.rnw.nl/english/video/middle-east-unrest-live-video

You may also watch Al Jazeera English, live video stream all the time at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

Al-Jazeera using Skype to cover unrest

Text of report by Qatari newspaper The Peninsula website on 30 January

Doha: The Al Jazeera Network have adapted to restricted communications in Egypt by adopting innovative social media techniques to extract news and views from the country.

While ordinary Egyptians have not had access to social networks like Twitter, Al Jazeera have been using Skype to record messages by members of the public. Al Jazeera has made the recordings available on Audioboo, promoting them through Facebook.

Al Jazeera’s web output has proved incredibly popular in the last 24 hours. The livestream from their English news channel has been viewed for 26 million minutes in the last 12 hours. The livestream has even been twice as popular as the website itself, putting more pressure on US cable platforms in particular to air the channel.

A spokesman said “Al Jazeera has been the most searched for term on the internet after Egypt itself, according to Alexa. The outside world was starved of first hand accounts when the internet went black in Egypt. Al Jazeera filled the void with live reports from across the country as the world flocked to our website for the latest developments on the ground.”
(Source: The Peninsula website, Doha, in English 30 Jan 11 via BBC Monitoring)

Related story:

Al Jazeera kicked out of Egypt, Nilesat signal cut
Qatar-based satellite channel Al Jazeera was ordered by Egypt’s information ministry earlier today to shut down its operations in the country, and later in the day its signal to some parts of the Middle East was cut. The news channel, which says it can reach 220 million households in more than 100 countries, said in a message on its broadcast that Egypt’s satellite Nilesat had cut off its broadcasting signal. That effectively took Al Jazeera off the air in some parts of the Arab world, but other signals were still available.

“Dear viewers, Al Jazeera’s signal has been cut off on Nilesat,” it broadcast via a signal visible in Kuwait, and gave satellite frequencies on which the channel was still available.

Earlier, Egyptian authorities ordered it to stop operations in Egypt, though correspondents were still reporting news by telephone. “The Information Minister ordered … suspension of operations of Al Jazeera, cancelling of its licences and withdrawing accreditation to all its staff as of today,” a statement on Egypt’s official Mena news agency said.

Launched in Doha, Qatar, in 1996, Al Jazeera has more than 400 reporters in over 60 countries, according to its website.

(Source: Reuters)

In a statement, Al Jazeera said it strongly denounces and condemns the closure of its bureau in Cairo by the Egyptian government. “Al Jazeera has received widespread global acclaim for their [sic] coverage on the ground across the length and breadth of Egypt,” the statement said.

An Al Jazeera spokesman said that the company would continue its strong coverage regardless. “Al Jazeera sees this as an act designed to stifle and repress the freedom of reporting by the network and its journalists,” the statement said.

“In this time of deep turmoil and unrest in Egyptian society it is imperative that voices from all sides be heard; the closing of our bureau by the Egyptian government is aimed at censoring and silencing the voices of the Egyptian people.

“Al Jazeera assures its audiences in Egypt and across the world that it will continue its in-depth and comprehensive reporting on the events unfolding in Egypt. Al Jazeera journalists have brought unparallelled reporting from the ground from across Egypt in the face of great danger and extraordinary circumstances. Al Jazeera Network is appalled at this latest attack by the Egyptian regime to strike at its freedom to report independently on the unprecedented events in Egypt.”

Al Jazeera’s Arabic channels are now broadcast as follows:

1) New frequency for Arabic and Mubasher on Nilesat 7W:
10949 vertical (new)
SR: 27.500 Msps
FEC: 3/4

2) New frequency for Arabic and Mubasher on Arabsat 26E:
11585 vertical (new)
SR: 27.500 Msps
FEC: 3/4

3) Arabic and Mubasher on Hotbird:
12111 MHz Vertical (Old)
SR: 27.500 Msps
FEC: 3/4

4) Arabic and Mubasher on Arabsat Badr4 (Old):
12034 MHz Horizontal
SR: 27.500
FEC: 3/4

5) Arabic and Mubasher on Arabsat Badr4 (Old):
11996 MHz Horizontal
SR: 27.500
FEC: 3/4

(Source: Al Jazeera/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)

Al Jazerra to broadcast to Canada

Canada’s broadcasting regulatory commission announced yesterday that it will allow Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network to broadcast in English in Canada. In a statement, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said authorizing Al Jazeera to broadcast “will expand the diversity of editorial points of view in the Canadian broadcasting system.

“Further, despite concerns expressed by certain parties, there is nothing on the record of the current proceeding that leads the commission to conclude that (Al Jazeera) would violate Canadian regulations, such as those regarding abusive comment,” the commission said.

The 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week English-language international news service is currently available in over 100 countries and via the Internet. In 2004 the CRTC authorized Al Jazeera’s Arab language service to broadcast in Canada but only under criteria so strict it required broadcasts to be monitored for breaches, and so no satellite or cable service provider has yet opted to offer the channel.

More than 2600 parties filed comments with the CRTC in support of Al Jazeera’s latest request, arguing it would increase diversity of Canadian television, while 40 parties opposed the bid. Opponents accused the broadcaster of “unbalanced reporting” and “abusive” commentaries.
(Source: AFP/R Netherlands Media Network)

Al Jazeera English covers "nouveau cold war story" in Honduras

"I arrived in Honduras one week after ousted president Manuel Zelaya returned to begin his long spell of internal exile in the Brazilian embassy. With my crew from Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English TV, I went straight from the airport to a funeral. A week later, on our last night of filming, we attended another funeral.

The first was for a 24-year-old woman, the second for a 50-year-old schoolteacher, and both active in the resistance to the coup. ... Unsurprisingly, the US mainstream media is not reporting the story of what is really going on in Honduras. The de facto government and its backers invested $400,000 (that we know of) in bipartisan lobbying, and succeeded in implanting a deeply distorted narrative of events--a nouveau cold war story starring Hugo Chávez as puppet master and Zelaya as marionette.

Meanwhile, the voice of the social movement struggling to reform its country's constitution in the second poorest nation in the hemisphere has been all but ignored." Avi Lewis, The Nation 26 Oct., 2009 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/lewis with links to video of AJE's Fault Lines: 100 Days of Resistance. Regardless of what we think about the events in Honduras, the writer's language, at least in this blurb, does not position Al Jazeera English as a dispassionate, objective news source. "About Fault Lines: Looking deeper into the US and its place in the world." AJE website at http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/faultlines/ .
(Kim Elliott)