Understanding Transcultural Communication and Middle East Politics Through Al Jazeera Practices

1 Research Method

The article attempts to unveil how Al Jazeera shapes its transcultural communication, and its impact on politics within and beyond Middle East through observation and inductive approaches. Traditional approaches to investigating transcultural communication frequently focus on the media system and are frequently comparative studies motivated by traditional political science and comparative politics. According to this paradigm, the Global South is widely regarded as a region with a subpar media system characterized by strong state intervention and a lack of press freedom, whereas the Global North is widely regarded as a model of media freedom and liberal democracy. According to Livingstone (2003), the nation is not a suitable unit for comparison, and analysis of the complexity of communication relations is required as transcultural communication extending across borders (Hepp, 2015).

A grounded, inductive methodology would make it possible to study media output and audience behaviors across cultures less prescriptively, avoiding the normative classification of international media-state relations used in comparative media systems analysis (Willems, 2014). Al Jazeera as a transnational media institution is successful in shaping national politics and pan-Arab politics, and exerting influence on other parts of the world, particularly in the West.

To analyze the transcultural communicative practices of Al Jazeera, inductive approach is to be employed to discover strategies that makes Al Jazeera successful, and sources of positive reviews and regional acceptance on Al Jazeera. Observation will also be used to investigate the events that news organization selected to cover, to study the discursive components and features of the news discourse, to uncover media institution’s mindsets and ideologies. By studying media culture and practice with above approaches rather than media systems, a better understanding of the power of transcultural communication that media brings to the politics and its wider impact on international politics would be reached.

2 Uneven Transcultural Flow and the Rise of Global South

Transcultural conflicts between “West and the Rest” on media are easy to be detected (Hall, 1992). Mediascape is one of the five dimensions Appadurai (1990) proposed to examine globalization. Appadurai pointed out that the image and narrative media presented are based on the interests of those who own them and control them. This is no exception whether produced by private or state interests.

The network and flow are two dimensions to understand the globalization of media communication (Castells, 2009). Communication flows are not evenly distributed within a network. Large, powerful transnational news agencies and corporations spread highly unequal flows of information. This is especially obvious in political journalism as the advancement of globalization has shifted political decision-making from national to transnational level (Sassen, 2009). The Rest looks to the West for information and is seen as a consumer of media products produced by influential transnational Western corporations.

The McBride Report, which called for a new global information and communication order, was published by UNESCO in 1980. This report laid emphasis upon the news flow inequality between the West and the Rest. West only reports the Rest when disaster or emergency occurs or where its profits at risk. People in the Rest, on the other hand, typically heard more about what was happening in the West than in their own districts. The spread of multidirectional information flows from a variety of sources should be hastened by increased participation by more people in transcultural communication activities.

The Rest is commonly referred to as the Global South, a term designates regions of underdeveloped and emerging countries that require assistance from the West. After Cold War, the phrase was given additional implications as it also refers to the area where new future visions are taking shape and where global politics and decolonial society are in play (Willems, 2014). The cultural and technological industries of the Global North have had and continue to have an impact on media landscapes in the Global South. Breaking the hegemonic position of discourse held by Western media has been a long-standing goal of Global South.

Middle East has long been in spotlight for many reasons. The region is strategically important and unsettling for Western countries due to political, military, religious and economic factors. Due to well-established media hegemony, this area has relied heavily on Global North for news since the 20th century. In the mid-twentieth, radio usage in Arab countries increased dramatically. The radio station Voice of the Arabs, sponsored by Egypt, was influential but widely jammed by Nasser’s political rivals in countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. In the early 1990s, when television came into power, each country had its own TV station to help build local identity and control the flow of information to the public by government. Saudi Arabia’s wealthy royal family pioneered satellite stations, enabling more coverage of Arab and global issues while avoiding critical reporting on the country and its royal family. For a long time, there has been a lack of a credible media outlet with regional influence.

The prospect of a bigger media market, as well as the desire of spreading voices to a wider world, inspired Qatar’s emir to establish Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was started in 1996 by Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa, with an investment of 140 million USD and employees recruited from short-lived BBC Arabic Television. Al Jazeera means “peninsula” in Arabic language, referring to the Arabian Peninsula in general and Qatar in particular, which is a peninsula within the Arabian Peninsula. The name also metaphors Al Jazeera as an island of professional journalism in a region of the world where it is not traditionally prevalent. In 2006, Al Jazeera English was launched with the demand of Emir of Qatar to expand the worldwide influence. The goal of Al Jazeera English is to cover the developing world, also known as the Global South, which its rivals far too frequently neglect (Rushing, 2007).

Al Jazeera English has made several firsts, including being the first HDTV network to broadcast worldwide, distributing airtime among four different locations, and continuously streaming all its programming online (Rushing, 2007). The introduction of Al Jazeera English brought additional aspects of transculturation into focus. The broadcasting facilities and offices of Al Jazeera English are dispersed across the globe, and when combined, they form a complex transcultural system (Hepp, 2015). Al Jazeera English has hired locals from various backgrounds to cover the stories that originate in their communities and have the biggest effects on their daily lives (Rushing, 2007). Transcultural journalism could also be understood as a work of “translations, transmissions and transformations (Baumann et al., 2011).”

Initially Al Jazeera had positioned itself as a news broadcaster that reported on parts of the world that were relatively neglected by the BBC World Service and CNN International (Arsenault, 2012). The channel adopts a stance that it is opposed to the Anglo-Saxon style of reporting (Barkho, 2011) and that it is committed to giving a platform to groups that tend to be marginalized by other broadcasters (El-Nawawy & Powers, 2010).

Before the establishment of Al Jazeera in Qatar, people in the Arab world got mainly a Western perspective. Western news organizations seldom report the complex realities of events in the Middle East, so Al Jazeera filled a void (Seib, 2008). The increased global attention has brought attention to Al Jazeera’s dominance in telling the stories of the Arab world. It has helped to establish a pan-Arab identity through transcultural communication by not only constructing from national entities but also locating its own nation in the larger political world. By communicating in both Arabic and English and incorporating content from Arabic Web sites, blogs, and other online resources into its message, Al Jazeera promotes unprecedented cohesion in the international Arab community.

Egyptian journalist Fahmy Howeidy (2007) wrote that before the advent of Al Jazeera, he would only watch entertainment shows or football games on Arab TV channels during times of relaxation, laziness, or boredom and relied on Western television channels for chasing news bulletins and reports of important events. Television stations in Arab countries broadcasted boring entertainment programs and talk shows with no critical report of local governments. Gallup’s previous poll of the Islamic World asked citizens of nine primarily Islamic countries to identify their go-to television station for news updates. The results show that Al Jazeera is a significant source of news in each of the participating countries in the study. According to the result, Al Jazeera became the undisputed leader in Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia for news. Other satellite TV stations in the area fared poorly as viewers’ preferred news source compared to Al-Jazeera. What is also important is that Al Jazeera allows us not to treat the globalization of media communication from a Western perspective. Very few people in these Arab countries associate the phrase “has a pro-Western bias (Gallup, 2002)” with Al-Jazeera.

The Global South has long been unable to change information flow due to financial and technological barriers. With the development of communication satellites and digital technology, threshold for global news dissemination has been greatly lowered. Communication flows are now multidirectional and more complicated, rather than unidirectional from North to South. Global South countries have begun to try to compete for the right to speak in the global news stream. Al Jazeera, the Arab media first succeeded in Middle East, became famous worldwide after the introduction of English-language channel for direct distribution to non-Arabic audiences. Several Western academics expressed concern about the perspective of the Global North in media and communication studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s and called for the “internationalization (Downing, 1996)” or “de-Westernization (Curran & Park, 2000)” of the discipline. As the Global South becomes a more powerful force in the reconfiguration of global relations, there is a need to broaden the scope of case studies to better reflect all regions of the world, particularly the Global South (Willems, 2014).

3 Al Jazeera Effect

Transcultural communication helps agenda-setting and achieving desired policy goals. With Al Jazeera’s outstanding performance of being the most noticeable participant in the enormous field of new communications and information provider that promote global pluralism and transcend Western information hegemony, Western political scientists have coined the term “Al Jazeera Effect (Youmans, 2013)” to highlight the decentralizing influence made by Al Jazeera. What Al Jazeera reports, how information is framed, to what extent and by what method the message is delivered all deserve close analysis.

With the establishment of Al Jazeera, the Western media no longer has a monopoly on Middle East coverage. In the early 1990s, when all international telephone lines in Kuwait and Iraq were cut off at the height of the Gulf War, CNN become the only source for the whole world by purchasing six satellite phones. The whole world understood this war through the lens of CNN with the angle of the United States. Arab television stations did not have their own agendas and showed no independent voices of Arabs during Gulf War as they completely copied Western media agenda, which was full of inaccurate and biased reporting (Li & Zhou, 2003). When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban told journalists from the West to leave, but they let Al Jazeera stay. As a result, Al Jazeera was the first television channel in the world to air footage of the airstrikes, and the only one to broadcast the scenes live to the world. Besides this, a pre-recorded tape of bin Laden’s speech to Al Jazeera’s correspondent station in Kabul aired just as it was being attacked by U.S. and British air forces. Al Jazeera’s footage was brought by channel all over the world and the channel has made itself famous.

Many Arabs no longer had to rely on the BBC, CNN, or other external news sources when a significant story broke. Instead, they could discover news that was presented from an Arab viewpoint (Seib, 2008). The U.S. war against Iraq, which began in 2003, was the first war in human history to be completely televised with various global channels providing scenes of missiles soaring from aircraft carriers, artillery fire, burning buildings and air-raid sirens in Baghdad. However, journalists of the various TV channels represented by CNN reported live broadcast in studio, not the front line, and their reports are largely their own subjective descriptions or even comments on the scene, which largely undermines the live audio-visual advantage of the TV medium and, at the same time, creates several questionable news stories as well as opportunities for hearsay. One CNN report “Iraqi army division gives up fight” said 8,000 people in the 51st Iraqi Division surrendered, including the division commander. The coverage included a few shots of the surrendered Iraqi soldiers, followed immediately by pre-recorded footage of an Iraqi soldier who had participated in the 1991 Gulf War and was already living in the United States denouncing Saddam. In reporting of Iraq War, Al Jazeera has captured many scenes of the U.S. bombing of Baghdad, as well as footage capturing American prisoners. Its footage has been used extensively by Western media outlets around the world. Due to Al Jazeera’s success, competitors in Middle East like Abu Dhabi TV have prioritized live, in-depth coverage.

The reactions Al Jazeera eliciting from its viewers talk much about the popular politics of the region. In 2005, after Egypt’s first multicandidate election, President Hosni Mubarak won. The anti-Mubarak demonstrations in Cairo were not covered by Egypt’s state-run television. Political commentator Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, a well-known opponent of the president who is not permitted to appear on Egyptian channels, was interviewed by Al Jazeera and aired on the network. Two months later when parliamentary election took place, Egyptian channel didn’t report any news of the violence of boycott while Al Jazeera aired footage of voters with bloodied faces and thugs brandishing machetes (Seib, 2008). Marc Lynch noted that Al Jazeera’s talk shows “were broadcast live and uncensored, offering an unmatchable window into Arab public political argumentation” as Saddam Hussein’s regime crumbled in 2003 (Lynch, 2006). These programs encouraged viewers’ speculations about what might occur if other regimes were to fall by allowing viewers in the Middle East and elsewhere to take part in the dramatic moments of events.

Al Jazeera also brought change to the media climate in the Middle East about the coverage of Israel by Arab news organizations. During the removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005, journalists of Al Jazeera interviewed anguished settlers, weeping soldiers, and even Israeli military’s chief of staff and showed empathy for their plight in these interviews. More airtime is devoted to Israeli issues on Al Jazeera than on any other channel outside of Israel. The network is well-liked in Israel and extensively covers Israeli affairs (Miles, 2006). While government-run Arab channels only show Israel as propagandistic caricatures and Western news organizations are not credible on conflicts with Israel, Al Jazeera is the only media that honestly portray the Israeli picture to Arabic viewers.

Al Jazeera typically contextualizes news in a larger Arab context when covering individual Arab countries. This regional approach can shape how viewers see Middle East in relation to a larger world context. There is a rise in anti-Americanism in this region, which may be explained not only by appearance of bloody images from Palestine or Iraq, but also by the common narrative linking America as the common denominator for each distinct issue (Lynch, 2006). The rise of the Al Jazeera has allowed the world to get a more realistic and accurate picture of the Arab world. While it is customary to watch the Western media’s attitude when international events occur, there is also a growing desire to pay attention to the peninsula, as it often offers a refreshing contrast to the uniformity of the Western mainstream media’s rhetoric.

Al Jazeera English offers worldwide television broadcasts and online services. The new channel was clear on its market strategy with emphasis on reporting from South to North and its breadth of coverage made it distinguished from many of its competitors. Global South has been reported more frequently than in respect to the Global North as underprivileged regions were more frequent source of stories. Since its inception, Al Jazeera English’s agenda has focused on reflecting regions that have been neglected by the Western mainstream media, such as Southern Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, and has taken care to delve deeper into the news rather than following the clichés of war, floods, and hunger that are often used by the Western media when covering developing countries. Besides, Al Jazeera also provides a platform for showing alternative viewpoints, including elites who are marginalized by other international news organizations, particularly elites in non-Western nations. Al Jazeera English’s production involved viewers from various cultural contexts outside the Arab world.

The globalization of communication is generally associated the existing flows of communication across different countries. With the advent of satellite television, this strategy was sharpened, but the focus has largely shifted to how the Internet influences the flow of news. Al Jazeera English streams its content online to challenge the Western media landscape. Many people around the world view Al Jazeera as David facing down the Western world’s Goliath (Rushing, 2007). The channel’s website, YouTube channel (Al Jazeera, 2022a), Facebook page (Al Jazeera, 2022b) and other online platforms are the main ways for viewers to access Al Jazeera’s programs. Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel has approximately 9.18 million subscribers to date, while its Facebook page has 16.44 million followers. With an increasingly broadened discourse, Al Jazeera can effectively provide a different discourse on world risks such as terrorism than the US version.

When Israel launched its massive military strike against Hamas in December 2008, Al Jazeera English was the only English-language news outlets with reporters in Gaza, and its ratings rose dramatically. For people unable to watch Al Jazeera English on television channels, they watched the coverage on websites such as YouTube. The crisis in Gaza has reinforced the network’s belief in the power of the Internet. In its coverage of the Beirut bombing in August 2021, Al Jazeera focused on powering new media platforms, especially overseas social media platforms. The timely coverage of more than 27 minutes included phone links with frontline reporters and live picture coverage of the Beirut locale. After the explosion, Al Jazeera was the fastest to release news through its official accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Al Jazeera English’s Twitter account has more than 7.9 million followers, and the 3-hour, 20-minute live broadcast posted on the day of the explosion received nearly 810 thousand cumulative views. In addition, Al Jazeera updated its social media accounts with news about the Beirut bombing at an average rate of 5 to 8 minutes, using “UPDATE” as a reminder, and posting timely information in the form of pictures, text, and short videos, including sharing links to news stories on its official website. Various digital platforms of Al Jazeera network maximized the reporting effect.

Through various platforms and mobile apps, Al Jazeera’s digital division reaches its audience by offering content in six different languages. Al Jazeera Media Network found that in 2020, during a period of 90 days, 1.4 billion people have watched Al Jazeera content across all its digital platforms, setting a record. This figure represents an increase of 31% when compared to the same time last year and a rise of 20.8% when compared to the previous three months. This statistic demonstrates the audience’s trust in Al Jazeera as their main source of accurate and trustworthy information.

A complex web of multi-vocal, multi-media, and multi-directional flows now characterizes the global media landscape as a result of the expansion of transnational satellite television (Seib, 2008). There are worries that Al Jazeera English will adopt a similar international stance to its main Western competitors despite Al Jazeera’s commitment to presenting in a non-Western discourse (Soliman & Feuilherade, 2006). Al Jazeera staff stated that they don’t carry slogans or propaganda and are merely regular individuals who love journalism (Abt, 2004). Al Jazeera always sticks to showing a different perspective from the Western world and presenting interests and needs of the underprivileged in its own unique discourse. The “Al Jazeera Effect” is a term used in political science and media studies to describe how new media and media sources have an impact on global politics, specifically how they have lessened the information monopoly held by the government and mainstream media and given previously voiceless groups a stronger global voice. The phrase exemplified the influence the Al Jazeera network had on Middle East politics.

4 Al Jazeera’s Interaction with Politics

The unique strategic motivation behind the channel gives distinctive characteristics of Al Jazeera different from its Anglo-American competitors to win global recognition. Al Jazeera is a place where different opinions are on full display. The TIME magazine declared at its inception that there can be no complete neutrality, nor should there be, on public issues and breaking news. Also, editors cannot be free of certain biases (Li & Liu, 1996). Al Jazeera usually reduced bias by publishing as many different points of view as possible. Al Jazeera balanced points of view, bringing live debate programming to the Middle East, touching on a wide and controversial range of topics, featuring Islamic terrorists, Israeli officials, Palestinian refugees, LGBTQ, and others. It gives people in this region who have long been limited in information a glimpse of the larger world.

What the Qatari Emir wanted to do is to extend the credibility of this Arab network which has reached a broader international audience. Governments’ accusations against Al Jazeera from other governments have instead made Al Jazeera more credible. Josh Rushing, host of Al Jazeera’s fortnightly show Fault Lines that digs deeper into what is driving the big news stories of the day, recalled that he never heard mention of their marketing strategy, or even the competition with BBC World and CNN International in editorial meetings. What can be added to the current coverage or who should have a voice in a particular story are frequent topics of conversation (Rushing, 2007). Many elites interviewed by Al Jazeera were interviewed for the first time on Arab television, including Hamas’ spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon.

During the long-lasting Iraq War, the United States and Iraq both tried to use false information to confuse the other side and even to deceive the international community for gaining sympathy. At a time when the veracity of information published by both the United States and Iraq has been greatly compromised, even the United States’ media cannot deny that Al Jazeera has become synonymous with “objectivity” and “trustworthiness” and that people “believe only what its cameras capture (Cohn, 2003).” The objectivity of Al Jazeera is frequently questioned by critics, especially in the West, but this criticism is misguided because it fails to recognize the channel’s core virtues. Most of Al Jazeera’s viewers believe that credibility is the most crucial quality in a news source, and they prefer news that is independently gathered for Arabs by Arabs and observing events from their point of view rather than evaluating the news they receive in accordance with standards established by outsiders.

In the Arab world, where state-run media is the conventional practice, the privately owned station is somewhat of a rarity. Widespread criticism toward Al Jazeera could be seen as the highest form of validation in journalism (Rushing, 2007). Its distinctive reporting style has occasionally gotten on the nerves of both Arab and Western leaders. U.S. government demonized Al Jazeera and called it the Osama bin Laden channel. Consequently, major cable and satellite providers balked at carrying Al Jazeera upon its entry into the United States out of fear of backlash from politicians and the general public. Complaints are also from Middle East countries. In 1998, Al Jazeera’s Kuwait bureau was shut down for two months because an invited guest criticized the Kuwaiti prince. In the same year, Al Jazeera made Iraq angry for broadcasting Saddam’s birthday party. Between April and May 2000 alone, Syria, Libya and Tunisia have recalled their ambassadors to Qatar (Yao, 2010). In 2002, Bahrain expelled Al Jazeera after alleging that the station harbored pro-Israel and anti-Bahrain sentiments. After the journalists criticized the Algerian government and military leadership, Algeria imprisoned the journalists and banned Al Jazeera from broadcasting from within its borders. The channel was accused of inciting protests in Iran in 2005. Egypt has reprimanded Al Jazeera for broadcasting pornographic programs. Arafat has been angered more than once by Al Jazeera’s exclusive interviews with Hamas leaders. Saudi Arabia, unable to stop Al Jazeera from airing debates that contradict its own ideas, has pressured its domestic advertisers not to engage with Al Jazeera.

For most Middle East countries in the Gulf and other Arab nations, the Al Jazeera network has long been a source of annoyance. To pursue its foreign policy, which frequently defied expectations and regional norms, Qatar had to take the Saudi Arabian government’s lead in world affairs. Hedging is a strategy adopted by Qatar, which prefers to keep open channels of communication and relatively close and cordial relations with multiple states and non-state actors with which the Saudis and the Emiratis do not get along (Kamrava, 2018). Saudi Arabia is furious that Qatar has established what appear to be friendly or even diplomatic relations with Iran, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The 2014 and 2017 conflict between Qatar and its Arab neighbors can be traced back to Doha’s increasingly assertive foreign policy. The conflicts arose because Saudi Arabia and the UAE wanted to transform Qatar into a country without fully independent foreign and security policies. In the most recent dispute, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt cut off all trade with Qatar, put it under a complete land and air blockade, and started a public relations and media campaign to demonize and isolate the country. Then, Qatar was given a list of demands by Saudi Arabia and its allies. Closure of the Al Jazeera was one of the demands. After the dispute was resolved, Al Jazeera, which had long served as a reflection of Qatar’s foreign policy, ceased almost all its coverage of the conflicts in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and military campaign in Yemen. The main spiritual figures of the Muslim Brotherhood were no longer broadcast on the station’s Arabic channel, and instead, its programming started to lean more toward Saudi Arabia (Zayani, 2016). For most of the 1990s and 2000s, Qatar’s foreign policy was distinct from that of other Gulf countries, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The conflict in terms of public relations between Qatar and the surrounding Middle Eastern nations gained new depth with the launch of Al Jazeera.

A skeptical audience has been persuaded that Arab media can be useful and that it is no longer necessary to rely on Western news organizations for information about significant events. Whether media organizations can react quickly to report and how the reports are presented largely determines the ownership of international discourse. Al Jazeera has become the first destination for news and information in most of the Middle East thanks to its comparatively trustworthy journalism and creative programming. Politics can be affected by the combination of a dynamic news presentation and an expanded flow of information. Al Jazeera’s newscasts have altered the public’s perception of politics by allowing people to see more of what is going on and subtly encouraging them to participate.

5 Transcultural Communication and Power Building

With the world’s growing population and enhanced connectivity, it is increasingly difficult for countries to remain outside of global tensions and conflicts as distance no longer matters (Samovar & Porter, 2004). The enduring tensions between Israel and Palestine open possibilities for global conflict and worldwide military involvement. This makes effective cross-cultural communication important. When talking about communication between cultures, Americanization was frequently described as the exercise of cultural dominance by one central nation over others on the periphery (Galtung, 1971). Global communication has, however, reached a level of complexity that is no longer adequately understandable in terms of national or imperial structures as emerging countries began to “communicate back” (Boyd-Barrett & Thussu, 1992) to the West. To comprehend the breadth and scope of various levels of hybridity at the social level, the study of media and communication should now enter the general discourse of the social sciences and integrate political analysis. The study of media anthropology has not always adequately accounted for these larger structures, and the field itself needs to be viewed as the site where the visible imprint of global forces becomes embedded in the subjectivity and agency of local people (Willems, 2014).

Culture follows power because power controls the flow of information (Samovar & Porter, 2004). Successful transcultural communication influences public opinion and raises public’s temperature. At the same time, culture also shapes power. Changes in the information flow will affect the globalization as information consumers will face the challenge of determining which of an extraordinary number of voices should be heard. Hidden grip of culture influences the way people understand and interact with the world. The Global South has pursued modernization, rejecting being simply shaped by Western culture by exporting own information output. Media is not just the media anymore. As the power of transnational satellite changes the world, they have an influence on international politics that has never been seen before. For instance, Arab populations were able to watch Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Palestinian uprising in 2000 without having to block it through Western eyes or government censorship. This showed Israelis that political feelings in the countries around them were getting even more heated. When the proliferation of television is combined with the vast capabilities of the Internet, the political universe expands dramatically (Seib, 2008).

The impact of new media technologies such as satellite television, the Internet, and other high-tech tools, has supplanted conventional methods of reshaping international politics. Journalistic enterprise can act as a check on the power of governments provided it earns and keeps the trust of the public. News organizations such as Al Jazeera are widely perceived to be political actors. The narratives presented by global news organizations in the media play a significant part in the decision-making process of policymakers and, as a result, ultimately affect the outcomes of events (Gilboa, 2005). The term “Al Jazeera Effect” refers to the application of new forms of media as tools in all aspects of international politics and policy, from democratic reform to countering acts of terrorism. Al Jazeera has been credited with sparking a media explosion in the Middle East. This has ended the region’s long-standing monopoly on government-run media. A large portion of the world has relied on CNN, BBC, and other Western news organizations for many years, but the newcomers are taking influence away from them.

Al Jazeera promoted the formation of culture circle in Middle East. It not only allowed the media of a small developing country to break into the international mainstream for the first time, but also allowed the world to hear the voices of Arabs themselves. The entire Arab world has also quietly changed its discriminatory stereotyped labels. Al Jazeera quickly became the leading television source for the building of an Arab perspective on significant events and its coverage attracted the attention of news organizations elsewhere. Thus, the significance of Al Jazeera lies not only in how the weaker media can triumph over the stronger media, but also in how it can change the unbalanced international news flow and give a country and a region a voice in the international arena. Although located in a disadvantaged geo-cultural sphere, Al Jazeera built its credibility by broadcasting live international news 24/7 to different cultures. The success of local markets within geo-cultural circles inevitably stimulates and drives local competitors, which in turn promote transcultural communication and its impact. As media representing disadvantaged geo-cultural spheres gain a voice in the international mainstream, the disadvantaged geo-cultural sphere makes the leap from the periphery to the center of the international discourse.

Without Al Jazeera and its programs repeating “We report from Doha” every day, many people would not know Qatar. Qatar is a country in Southwest Asia that belongs to the Arab world. Its only neighbor to the South is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf encompasses a significant portion of Qatar’s landmass. Because of the country’s vast oil reserves, Qatar is consistently ranked as one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Despite being just over 11,000 square kilometers in size, Qatar particularly focused on the building of its influence in international communications. It is because of Al Jazeera that Qatar is no longer a tiny Gulf emirate but a world’s focus. No one big has ever turned down an invitation to Doha. The country has become an important stage of global renowned events like the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization, Asian Games, Qatar Economic Forum, AFC Asian Cup and the first FIFA World Cup in Middle East. Al Jazeera is seen as a stabilizing factor for Qatar in the region, giving the nation a lot of flexibility while maintaining its security and stability. The transcultural media network played a significant role in reducing Saudi influence and opening the door for Qatar to replace Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as the United States’ preferred Gulf ally (El-Oifi, 2005). Conflicts like Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait are unlikely to happen in Qatar because Al Jazeera has created huge soft power to balancing other power in this region. Successful transcultural communication from Al Jazeera has enable Qatar more power to participates actively in regional and international affairs.

With the advancement of globalization, competition among countries grow fiercer in the realm of media and communication, and transcultural communication, as an important component of soft power, has become increasingly important. Intangible power resources are often associated with the ability to influence other countries (Nye, 1990), and are now more significant due to the evolving nature of international politics. Despite economic leaps, some Global South countries have largely lost their voices in the global news flow dominated by Western countries, thus affecting the further development. The Qatar-based Al Jazeera has demonstrated that it is possible to successfully challenge the hegemony of the primarily Western media establishment while playing a historic role in media transformation throughout the Middle East. It is not difficult to imagine that with rise of Global South in aspects, Global South countries can compete with Global North in the field of transcultural communication with their own efforts and professional practice. Soft power building will eventually empower the Global South a stronger voice in the tug of war of international politics. To achieve this vision as soon as possible, governments of Global South countries must provide economic support and a certain degree of freedom in news reporting to compete with Western media and gain a say in global transcultural atmosphere.