An Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera's Struggle in America

by William Youmans

Overview

In 2006, the Al Jazeera Media Network sought to penetrate the United States media sphere, the world's most influential national market for English language news. These unyielding ambitions surprised those who knew the network as the Arab media service President Bush lambasted as "hateful propaganda" in his 2004 State of the Union address. The world watched skeptically yet curiously as Al Jazeera labored to establish a presence in the famously insular American market.

The network's decade-long struggle included both fleeting successes, like the sudden surge of popular interest during the Arab spring, as well as momentous failures. The April 2016 closure of its $2 billion Al Jazeera America channel was just one of a series of setbacks. An Unlikely Audience investigates the inner workings of a complex news organization fighting to overcome deep obstacles, foster strategic alliances and build its identity in a country notoriously disinterested in international news.

William Youmans argues counter-intuitively that making sense of Al Jazeera's tortured push into the United States as a national news market, actually requires a local lens. He reveals the network's appeal to American audiences by presenting its three independent US-facing subsidiaries in their primary locales of production: Al Jazeera English (AJE) in Washington, DC, Al Jazeera America (AJAM) in New York, and AJ+ in San Francisco. These cities are centers of vital industries-media-politics, commercial TV news and technology, respectively. As Youmans shows, the success of the outlets hinged on the locations in which they operated because Al Jazeera assimilated aspects of their core industries. An Unlikely Audience proves that place is critical to the formation and evolution of multi-national media organizations, despite the rise of communication technologies that many believe make location less relevant.

Mining data from over 50 interviews since 2010, internal documents, and original surveys, the book offers a brisk and authoritative account of the world's most recognizable media-brand and its decade-long ingress into the US - crucial background for Al Jazeera's continued expansion in the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190655723
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/14/2017
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

William Lafi Youmans is an Assistant Professor at The George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs. He researches the intersection of international communication, politics and law.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction

Chapter 1: The Obstacles to Al Jazeera in America

Chapter 2: From Media Capitals to Ports of Entry

Chapter 3: In the Beltway Before the Spring: The Rise of Al Jazeera English, Except in America

Chapter 4: Al Jazeera English's 'Moment' in the Media-Politics Capital, Washington, DC.

Chapter 5: Al Jazeera America: The Defunct New York City Broadcast Channel

Chapter 6: AJ+: Al Jazeera's Digital Start-up in San Francisco

Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"This is a well-researched history of Al Jazeera in the United States and should have broad appeal. Highly recommended."-CHOICE

"An Unlikely Audience makes a major contribution to global media studies. With its meticulous account of the rise and decline of Al Jazeera America, it focuses attention upon the centrality of an understanding of materiality, place and culture to transnational broadcasting, and the risks associated with overly focusing upon global technologies or cosmopolitan audiences."-Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

"Al-Jazeera has emerged in the past decade as an important player in the global news sphere. Yet despite its international profile, the network has not succeeded in the resolutely ethnocentric US television news arena. In this richly detailed and convincingly argued book, William Youmans provides the reasons for this failure. A commendable contribution to the literature on international journalism."-Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication, University of Westminster, London

From the Publisher

2017-04-02
The rise and fall and plateau of a controversial media outlet's attempt to penetrate the American market.This well-researched but lackluster account of media conglomerate Al Jazeera's attempts to make inroads to Western audiences started as a graduate school dissertation and largely still reads like one. Youmans (Media and Public Affairs/George Washington Univ.) tracks the burgeoning media network from its launch of Al Jazeera English in 2006 through the abrupt shuttering of Al Jazeera America in 2016. The author opens with an examination of the enormous regulatory and administrative hurdles the Qatar-backed channel had to overcome just to broadcast in the first place as well as the deep-rooted philosophical bias against the Middle East-based outlet in the wake of 9/11. Youmans argues that the best way to understand the arc of Al Jazeera is by diving into its distinct operations in Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco, breaking down its mechanics at the local level in order to understand how it analyzes and affects the world. "The awkward portmanteau ‘glocalization' refers to the co-occurrence of ‘universalizing and particularizing' forces in the movement of global goods, people and services," he writes. Unfortunately, for readers who are not media analysts, it doesn't get much more exciting than this, barring a couple of exceptions. Youmans does take a bracing deep dive into the 2011 emergence of the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, as Al Jazeera finally freed itself of the negative associations of the Gulf Wars and became a real presence on the global stage. Late in the book, the author also portrays the intriguing contrast between the now-defunct Al Jazeera America in New York City and its more daring digital startup, AJ+, which is still flourishing in the innovative media aquarium of San Francisco. An interesting but very academic history of a polarizing media presence.

Kirkus Reviews