Summary

“Hero or Heretic? Al-Jazeera And Arab Governments” begins with the description of a deliberate power outage in Algeria enacted by the Algerian government to mute a controversial talk show on the network discussing Algeria’s civil war and prevent viewers from watching the program. El-Nawawy and Iskandar hail this as an example of Arab states’ fear and hostility towards Al-Jazeera, as Qatari officials have received 450 official complaints from Arab states in the past. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, for example, have even denied visas to Al-Jazeera reporters.

The first country critical of Al-Jazeera which el-Nawawy and Iskandar discuss is Saudi Arabia, which is furious with the open discussions on Al-Jazeera that are easily accessible to anyone with a satellite dish. Their dominance of regional news media has weakened since Al-Jazeera’s rise to fame, leading to officials criticizing the...