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Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

nytimes.com

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Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#281

Post by amyjess »

pessimizer wrote: post #272
wyclif wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more accurate to say that the BBC is disliked by lots of people are aren't culturally Marxist. BBC is fine for left-leaning Anglosphere types, but it's not very broad in terms of the views covered.

"culturally Marxist" sounds like a right-wing way of saying "not Marxist." It makes about as much sense as being "culturally vegetarian."

"Cultural Marxism" is a shibboleth used in far-right white nationalist circles to mean "not racist". It's typically paired with claims that "cultural Marxism" is a "Jewish plot" to cause "white genocide".

If you see anyone use it unironically, run away.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#282

Post by brightball »

jessaustin wrote: post #183
brightball wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking…

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo... Surely at least some of the blame can be shared with the total abdication of the educational mission on the part of thousands of university administrators. The athletic tail has been wagging the academic dog for decades longer than Tivo has been around.

People say that a lot, but most athletic departments aren't actually profitable. The biggest thing that athletics helps with is marketing exposure for the university. Applications go through the roof when a team is on TV. It improves morale in the alumni base which has a big effect in academic donations as well.

I'm a Clemson grad for example and 15 years ago, Clemson's athletic department budget was about $30 million a year (for all sports combined). Since Tivo, it's gone up to about $70 million a year but it's totally self sufficient as well. It's all fueled by donations, ticket sales and TV revenues. TV revenues account for about $20 million of that budget so half of the increase is purely from TV.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#283

Post by brightball »

mikeash wrote: post #234
brightball wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking…

Isn't having millions of people watching the same thing at the same time easier than millions of people watching different things at the same time?

It is on a broadcast where people are listening to a single signal (radio, antenna, satellite, etc).

Over the internet, it has to operate as a point to point TCP connection for each device so 50,000 people watching is 50,000 individual HD streams. If multicast over the internet worked it'd be another ballgame of course.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#284

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

gotchange wrote: post #274
mikeash wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The etymology is not certain, but Albuquerque looks much more likely to be Latin than Arabic. As for the rest, well, there's a difference between English words with Arabic origins and Arabic words that haven't been appropriated into English. You can dislike the way people treat it all you want, and say it makes no sense (and I'd agree), but if you argue with how it works then you're basically yelling at the clouds.

They're are other places in Badajoz with the "AL" prefix and they're Arabic influenced so it's more likely that Albuquerque was as well than being Latin derived but my main argument stays the same that if English speaking xenophobes or bigots have any problem with the Arabic definite article "Al ال", they should cease using those words in their language to avoid public embarrassment and being labelled hypocrites.

Hypothetical example: let's say there was no Hitler or Hirohito but somehow Benito Mussolini - Il Duce, the leader - conquered Europe and conducted human rights abuses equal to or greater than the other Axis powers, all while expanding Italian territory through conquest.

Let's also say that you live in the Middle East, which for a while was Roman territory, the empire that Mussolini attempted to ressurect. You would have a good reason to fear Italian conquest and be distrustful of Italy in general, even if Italians themselves are generally amicable and the people in conquered territories resent the regime.

Now you hear that a major Italian news company - Il Notizie, the news - is establishing a pan-Arab station, Il Notizie Arabia. Would you trust it to be fair and balanced? Would you trust it not to have a subversive agenda?

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#285

Post by nyan4 »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #16

This comes as absolutely no surprise at all. It doesn't matter if you are the most accurate, informed, respectable news source in the world, because almost no Americans know what Al Jazeera is, and the name evokes the image backdrop of a middle eastern city most Americans can't find on a map, discussing topics of primary interest to American Muslims and few else, while the female anchors are veiled. Not to mention it…

It should have been named All Jazz Era. What? People like Jazz.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#286

Post by mikeash »

brightball wrote: post #283
mikeash wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't having millions of people watching the same thing at the same time easier than millions of people watching different things at the same time?

It is on a broadcast where people are listening to a single signal (radio, antenna, satellite, etc). Over the internet, it has to operate as a point to point TCP connection for each device so 50,000 people watching is 50,000 individual HD streams. If multicast over the internet worked it'd be another ballgame of course.

I understand the difference between broadcast as found in radio and how a "broadcast" would work over the internet.

But 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams that happen to contain the same thing still seems slightly easier than 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams with different content.

I'm taking it as a given that the technology and infrastructure is already there to support millions of people watching different streams simultaneously, since that seems to be what Netflix does.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#287

Post by gotchange »

freehunter wrote: post #273
gotchange wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not tenuous. Americans (Spanish settlers/Mexicans?) imported the name from Spanish (Castellano) and Spanish got it from Arabic and the list I made is just arbitrary and there are many many more Arabic origin words starting with "Al" that made their way to English and don't seem to have the same negative effect on the English speaker as claimed by you and the other poster.

It's not claimed, its real. Facebook and Twitter have this great thing where you can see into the minds of other people, and Al-Jazeera was trending the other day, so you got to see lots of people talking about it. Lots of hate, literally 100% because the name sounds Arabic. Hate doesn't care about entomology. We're talking about a country that renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries" to protest one of our oldest al…

Anecdotally speaking, I had no idea that the average American was so close minded like this that he would reject a channel just based on its foreign name.

This level of language chauvinism is not healthy at all.

However, I truly believe that Aljazeera punched above their weight when they ventured into the US market and that they pulled the plug quite early for any meaningful results to materialize but I think that they could find some solace in the fact that other established players like BBC would struggle considerably if they entered the US market to make headway in this saturated and hyper-competitive market.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#288

Post by freehunter »

gotchange wrote: post #287
freehunter wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not claimed, its real. Facebook and Twitter have this great thing where you can see into the minds of other people, and Al-Jazeera was trending the other day, so you got to see lots of people talking about it. Lots of hate, literally 100% because the name sounds Arabic. Hate doesn't care about entomology. We're talking about a country that renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries" to protest one of our oldest al…

Anecdotally speaking, I had no idea that the average American was so close minded like this that he would reject a channel just based on its foreign name. This level of language chauvinism is not healthy at all. However, I truly believe that Aljazeera punched above their weight when they ventured into the US market and that they pulled the plug quite early for any meaningful results to materialize but I think that th…

Yes, the problem is they didn't get enough viewers. Lots of reasons for that. The people who are going to care about high-quality journalism and not care about the negative connotations of an Arabic ownership are less likely to subscribe to cable, the only place to find Al Jazeera. Conversely, the majority of people who watch cable news tend to be older and more conservative, which is why Fox News has the number one viewership among cable news channels. Most people who watch Fox News will fit into the xenophobic demographic I mentioned above. If you don't think the "average American" (in this case "American" is defined as "someone who watches American cable news channels", not actually the average American) is that closed minded, remember that in 2012, Fox News had 2 million viewers compared to CNN's >700,000. Fox News has more viewers than every other cable news channel combined. [1]

It's not necessarily about the language, it's about the connotations. If you watch Al Jazeera, you're watching the terrorist propaganda. To the majority of people who watch cable news, that's where the thinking ends. You're right, it's not healthy, it's destroying our nation and the entire world with it.

Liberals are going to be pretty happy with NPR. Younger people are going to get their news from social media, not from cable. Conservatives are going to be very happy with Fox News. Older people aren't going to want to switch their news channel to something unproven. Al Jazeera has no audience in the US if they're trying to break into the cable news market.

[1] http://press.foxnews.com/2012/12/fox-news-channel-dominates-...

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#289

Post by ptaipale »

snake_plissken wrote: post #88

Man this stinks. Al Jazeera America is reliable and has done some solid reporting over the years. It wasn't afraid to call a spade a spade. Next to BloombergTV it's the only news channel worth watching. On a tin-foil hat aside, but the timing on this; coming a few weeks after they ran the story about performance enhancing drug use by some big name athletes...I can't help but think the two are somehow related.

Having seen and understood just a few fragments of Al Jazeera behaviour in Arabic, I have some difficulty in trusting it in English either.

E.g. just today came up this post which points out how Al Jazeera used a picture:

https://twitter.com/ranaharbi/status/685357579615232000

They stole a picture taken by photographer Serkan Gülsen in Istanbul in 2007 from his Flickr feed

https://www.flickr.com/photos/serkangulsen/771185410/in/date...

and now (January 2016) published it as evidence of suffering in the town of Madaya.

It's likely that the suffering in Madaya is more than horrible, but why be so lazy as to forge a picture like this? Are they actually trying to destroy their reputation, or do they just trust that the Arabic audience will not notice?

And if it does that in Arabic, do I trust it in English?

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#290

Post by hackuser »

Cyph0n wrote: post #237
hackuser wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AJ English is quite different from AJ Arabic that at times I feel it's a different channel entirely. I'd be very interested to know about AJ Arabic (and I don't speak Arabic at all). If you don't mind sharing a little more: How does it differ from AJ English? Also, maybe 15 years ago I'd hear how AJ Arabic was the only real journalism in the Arab world and a force for democracy and reform. Was that your experience?…

> I'd be very interested to know about AJ Arabic (and I don't speak Arabic at all). If you don't mind sharing a little more: How does it differ from AJ English? In general, the "feel" of the channel is different, to the point where if AJ English had another name, you'd have no idea they're related. More specifically, AJ English is a bit more general in its global coverage, whereas AJ Arabic focuses more on the region…

Thanks for taking the time to respond; it's hard to get that perspective in the U.S. and on HN.

> As with any other news channel, AJ Arabic has a clear agenda.

> The way I see it is that there simply is no neutral news source.

While it's literally true (there is no perfectly neutral news source) I disagree. There are large differences of degree. Similarly we could say that neighborhood A as a burglary rate of 1% and neighborhood B has a rate of 0.01%, therefore all neighborhoods are dangerous. While literally true, the statement obscures the facts.

In the U.S., Fox News is much more biased than the NY Times (or AJAM), but of course the latter sources do have some bias.

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