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Al Jazeera English Now Blocked In US

umfan said:
Well, the blocking of AJE is one positive side effect of the debut of AJ-A.

Since the channel isn't likely to garner much additional clearance, it'll be money wasted by their parent.

It also keeps the rejects they've hired off welfare, so some more goodness.

That's really about all the positives that will result from this change. Well, that and Cenk Ungar has lost his broadcast spot.
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Talk about nasty and closed minded. Some people want it to die even before it's launched.

They hired people away from other major news operations - people still employed there. These people were not on welfare. And they are the kind of small market, six week broadcast school types working for minimum wage - or on welfare - in the sticks. Big time broadcasting is a different world than anything most here are familiar with.

They laughed at CNN and Fox when those launched, too.
 
They hired persons who could at best be considered second tier.

O'Brien had already been shown the door.

It's not closed minded to point out the truth.
 
umfan said:
They hired persons who could at best be considered second tier.

O'Brien had already been shown the door.

It's not closed minded to point out the truth.
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OK, you anticipate that AJA will fail and revel in that anticipation.

Second tier? I have to wonder what tier you, or any of us here, are. The comment calls to mind a response from a friend of mine whom I invited to a AA minor league game. He said who wants to see guys like that play, they aren't any good. This is a guy who did not make his junior high team. Anybody playing minor league ball plays far better on their worse day than he, I or anybody we know played on our best day. Of all the hundreds of people who try to get into this business in a given year, only a handful - ever - make it to second tier.
 
umfan said:
They hired persons who could at best be considered second tier.
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The same criticism was aimed at CNN in its early days.

I can assure you that for every staffer that was hired at AJA, there were hundreds who applied and didn't get a job there.

I am glad to have AJA as a news alternative. If you don't like it, don't watch.
 
Besides, the University of Michigan is also "second tier."
 
I'll look to see if our local broadcast Channel 20.? still has Al Jazeera newcasts this evening.
I'd be real 'sprised if it's not on. My area has lots of of many different flavors of Islamic people and Jewish people and etc, and etc.
 
A big difference from the launch of CNN and FNC to AJA:

CNN: Ted Turner
FNC: Roger Ailes
AJA: Kate O'Brian

The first two were media geniuses who already had great success in the field. Ms. O'Brian, while not a fool, is little more than a competent mid-level executive formerly at ABC. The fact that AJA is bringing little, if anything new to the table, unlike CNN and FNC makes this a specious analogy at best.
 
Ted Turner did not "launch CNN, any more than Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani launched AJA. Reese Schoenfeld and Burt Reinhard launched CNN. Nobody ever heard of them back then. Both had previously come from UPI's newsfilm operation. And Bernie Shaw was considered very "second tier" when they hired him.

We get it. You want AJ to fail. Either you are opposed to going back to a more serious and in-depth approach to news - as opposed to gossip and political operatives shouting at each other like you-know-who - or your opposition to AJ is based on ethnic and religious prejudice.

Interesting you didn't keep your original account.
 
I couldn't log in with it after the shift. What's the big deal about that? I sent a message to tech support. If they resolve it, I'll use the account again. If that's what you find interesting, your existance is more pathetic than even I imagined it being.

AJA doesn't have top tier talent, has abysmal clearance, and lacks solid management. It does have a deep funding stream, however. AJA will succeed much as The Washington Times has, as long as its benefactor subsidizes its losses, it will remain in business.

It will never achieve even the lackluster ratings MSNBC gets.
 
My cable company doesn't offer Al Jazeera English and I'm bummed about that. I find that some of my friends are extremely negative about the channel fearing "propaganda". What are we, China? Cuba? .... worried about our citizens seeing news from the vantage point of another country?
 
http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...a-slow-ratings-start-20130828,0,4161683.story

Al Jazeera America made its debut on Aug. 20, and the first week of ratings are in. And they're pretty darn low.

According to TV Newser, the highest-rated show on the station, which replaced Current TV, was the Thursday airing of "Real Money With Ali Velshi." The program drew 54,000 total viewers, which is fewer than Al Jazeera America's Twitter audience of 75,000.

The channel's launch drew just 22,000 people, which is below the threshold which Nielsen claims it can report viewers. An audience that low is called "scratching."
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philosofy said:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...a-slow-ratings-start-20130828,0,4161683.story
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Not really a surprise, considering how few people actually have access to the channel. Even among the few who do, it'll take a while to come across the channel among the hundreds of channels, for people who don't follow media as closely as the people on this board. I'll bet a huge majority of Americans have never heard of AJAM. But if they give it a chance and get more cable carriage, it'll grow.
 
2013 is really being a jungle of a year with all the new networks coming online. Haven't seen this sort of activity in a year since 1996. New networks in Fusion (October), Univisión Deportes, Fox Sports 1&2, Pivot TV and AJAM. Not all of them have (or in FS1's case, would have had without the change in carriage policy) very good cable carriage.
 
I think it's silly. Al Jazeera has the $$$ and resources to make Al Jazeera America a SERIOUS contender in news networks across both TV and web platforms To me, they're squandering that potential. In this day and age where many folks have "cut the cord" with cable and satellite, now would be a good time to get serious about re-examining doing things in the so-called "traditional" way. Not just for Al Jazeera and the news networks, but for ALL TV.

This isn't 1998 folks.

It all comes down to this: The web isn't the future. It's NOW. Get hip or GTFO. Simple as that.
 
There are actually quite a few people with access to the channel. Dish, DirecTV, Comcast, and FiOS all carry the channel. Combined they make up over 60 million subscribers or just slightly under 2/3 of the 94.5 million pay tv subscribers. Judging by how poorly the channel is doing I would say there is just little interest in it. It has even been one of the most public launches of a channel due to the controversy surrounding the history of the network.

Their decision to not have an online web stream officially available to the US isn't helping things though. That made for a lot of unhappy people, probably more than are watching the network now.
 
It's been on the air less than a month. Way too soon to judge.
 
Chicken Noodle News was pretty rough the first year or two.

Still AJ English is much classier than AJ America. The AJ has been dumbed down for the US audience says something bad about us or at least what they think of us. The changes they made are everything AJ says they are not.
 
Trouble is, all of those are Pay TV suppliers. I'm hoping AJA will come on Globecast FTA (Galaxy-19), and I'd even like to see it on some DTV sub-channels.
 
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