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Al Jazeera.. 28 years of leadership and bias towards the truth

Al Jazeera celebrates its 28th anniversary, launched on November 1, 1996 from Doha as the first independent news channel in the Arab world. It has expanded to become an international media network with a number of outlets, including the Internet, and specialized television channels in several regions of the world and in multiple languages. Al Jazeera has faced many challenges throughout its history, which no other media outlet has faced. Its journalists have paid and continue to pay a heavy price: murder, imprisonment and torture, in their quest to convey the truth and the complete picture. However, despite this, Al Jazeera has achieved many successes and received international awards and prestigious certificates of honor in appreciation of the unique media content it provides. Al Jazeera, which started with one channel, has been able to transform into a global media network that includes a number of channels, specialized centers and digital platforms in multiple languages, as part of its continuous efforts to develop and provide diverse media products that keep pace with the rapid development in the field of news technology, which has enabled Al Jazeera to build bridges of cultural communication between peoples and open doors to knowledge and awareness. Al Jazeera has developed into a network that includes television channels: (news, English, documentary, Al Jazeera Mubasher, Al Jazeera Balkans, Al Jazeera America, and Al Jazeera Turkish), in addition to digital sector platforms such as AJ+, Al Jazeera Net, Al Jazeera Forum, Al Jazeera Encyclopedia, and Al Jazeera 360, in addition to the Al Jazeera Media Institute, the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, and the Al Jazeera Center for Public Liberties and Human Rights. Throughout its media career, Al Jazeera crews have been directly targeted in the battlefields to prevent Al Jazeera from conveying the truth. The result was the arrest and terrorizing of a number of the channel’s journalists, and even the martyrdom of a number of correspondents, journalists and photographers working for Al Jazeera, as a price for professionalism and conveying the truth, immortalizing their names in the list of martyrs of the media and truth. Throughout its pioneering journey in documenting the pivotal moments in the history of our Arab and Islamic nation, Al Jazeera Network faced many accusations and was blocked several times, and calls to boycott it and track down its journalists and bloggers invaded the channels that were part of the counter-revolutions. At the beginning of the brutal Israeli aggression on Gaza on October 7, 2023, Al Jazeera raised the slogan: “Coverage continues,” despite Israeli efforts to ban its coverage and target its journalists and photographers with arrest, intimidation, killing, and targeting their homes and the homes of their relatives. Al Jazeera succeeded in covering the events for 24 hours, transmitting the image with high quality, accuracy and professionalism, and demonstrated its worthiness to be at the forefront of Arab and international channels operating in the sector. Al Jazeera exclusively publishes the releases of the Palestinian resistance on the one hand, and what is issued by the occupation on the other hand, until it became a reference that the world goes to to keep up with events. The law, under which the Israeli Knesset (parliament) granted the government temporary powers to ban foreign news channels that harm the country’s national security from operating in Israel, or what was called the “Al Jazeera Law,” has sparked a lot of global reactions, reflecting the influence and power of Al Jazeera and its ability to convey the truth to the world about Israeli crimes and massacres in Gaza. The network is leading an international campaign to hold the occupation accountable for killing its journalists, a bold and effective step in confronting the gross human rights violations committed by the Israeli occupation forces against journalists. The international campaign began by revealing the exact details of the violations and crimes that targeted journalists and the media, and highlighting how Al Jazeera used evidence and documentation to prove the occupation’s role in these crimes, which could contribute to achieving international justice.