Al Jazeera America, the New York City-based news network, announced on Wednesday that it will end its operations for good on Apr. 30, 2016.
For Al Jazeera America (also referred to as AJAM), this closure only marks the end of a series of intense controversies which have rocked their agency over the last several months. After several years of striving to reinvent the formula for cable news, the latter half of 2015 marked the beginning of a sharp decline in their national credibility.
In June of last year, the company was first rocked by a series of internal turmoil which saw the replacement of its CEO as well as the resignation of numerous high-ranking executives. Following accusations of severe anti-Semitism and sexism within the newsroom – conditions which were allegedly fostered by AJAM’s then-CEO, Ehab Al Shihabi – hostility within their organization reached a boiling point.
With tensions peaking at AJAM, many at the head of the organization were pushed out of their positions, both by personal discontent and professional toxicity. Also leaving their position along with the three significant female executives who had resigned in the first half of last year (and were later followed out by several more prominent women in the company), was former CEO Shihabi. Marcy McGinnis, AJAM’s former senior VP of news gathering, who had resigned in the spring of 2015, called out Shihabi in a New York Times article from May of that year, attributing her departure to the “culture of fear” instigated by the then-CEO, and mentioning how “people are afraid to lose their jobs if they cross Ehabi.”
McGinnis’ sentiments certainly resonated with other members of the staff too, as former co-worker and fellow resignee Shannon High-Bassalik filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against AJAM for, among other things, the blatant prevalence of sexism in the workplace.
In the face of these controversies, Ehabi tried to highlight the “quality of the journalism” they were producing, reminding critics to “look at the [network’s] screens.” Even this assertion, however, was not shared within the media outlet’s own newsroom. The other reasons cited in High-Bassalik’s lawsuit against AJAM was an abandonment of “journalistic objectivity.”
High-Bassalik was not alone in her claims either, as the channel has often received criticism from other sources for “advancing a pro-Arabic/Middle Eastern agenda, often at the expense of Jewish people,” in High-Bassalik’s own words. As the New York Times pointed out in their May 2015 article on AJAM’s internal collapse, the news organization was formed as a Western spinoff of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, and as such would find it difficult to shed their ties to Arab biases.
Even beyond their alleged anti-Semitic reporting, or proclaimed sexist workplace environments, AJAM has also recently made the news for their inaccurate reporting of performance-enhancing-drug scandals involving such high profile athletes as NFL quarterback Peyton Manning and MLB players Ryan Zimmerman and Ryan Howard. This story, which rested largely on the testimony of alleged supplier Charles Sly, eventually collapsed after Sly recanted his statement in a YouTube video.
Further complicating the issue for AJAM are the pending defamation lawsuits being filed by Zimmerman and Howard, both of which are mounted primarily on the inaccuracy of the story’s sources. According to an article published on Deadspin’s website earlier this month, both parties had objected to the story before it even aired, and elaborated in their public statements of denial how uncredible AJAM’s sources had been.
The move by the self-proclaimed “Fact-based” reporting agency to publish such a story could potentially be viewed as a last-stand publicity grab for a network which was already drowning in unpopularity. Be it by nature of the generally pro-Arab reporting of their station or the low quality of work developed by their disgruntled staff, AJAM was reported by the Nielsen data as having prime-time viewer levels of twenty- to thirty-thousand, a figure which pales in comparison to the six-digit figures racked in by competitors such as CNN.
With such poor viewership combined with an ineffective staff, Al-Jazeera America will be forced to close their studios for good this upcoming spring. The date of their closure, April 30, marks nearly the one-year anniversary of the damning New York Times article which highlighted AJAM’s inefficiencies, and serves as yet another reminder of how quickly a bad ethic can destroy an entire workplace. For it was not only the ratings and professional morale which were sinking for AJAM over the last few months, but their very journalistic principle itself.
