Quoting article below
"The channel is still by far the most popular news channel in the Middle East, but was widely criticized for heavily covering the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, an enemy of Qatar, while giving short shrift to the protests in Qatar's fellow Gulf monarchy of Bahrain.
"It has always been an arm of Qatari foreign policy," said Simon Henderson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute.
Mr. Al Shihabi fiercely denies this charge, pointing to the dozens of journalism awards that Al Jazeera English, a global English-language channel, has won since its launch in 2006.
The U.S. channel is part of an international expansion of Al Jazeera that also includes local channels—either launched or planned—in France, Turkey and the Balkans. That push has gained steam since a member of Qatar's royal family became the network's director general in 2011, succeeding a Palestinian journalist known for his expertise in Middle Eastern affairs.
As a speck of a country with less than 300,000 citizens in a population of nearly two million and 14% of the world's natural-gas reserves, Qatar craves influence above all, particularly in the U.S., as a means to security, say analysts.
"They want to be on the map because they realize that their own success, stability and security is tied to the perception of them being global players," said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "They don't want anyone to ask, 'What is Qatar?' "
A spokesman for the Qatari Consulate in New York declined to comment. Mr. Al Shihabi said, "You are linking two things which I am not able to link in my mind."
For years, Al Jazeera tried to make sure Americans wouldn't have to ask this question by lobbying to get national U.S. cable carriage for Al Jazeera English. But they never made it past a few local markets. Mr. Al Shihabi believes that was less because of any reputation Al Jazeera might have had for anti-American coverage during the second Bush administration—such a branding was "not that damaging," he said. The bigger issue was the organization's naiveté about an independent channel's poor prospects in the U.S. cable landscape.
"Maybe we didn't understand the dynamic and the business case and the pressure on cable operators," Mr. Al Shihabi said."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324049504578545822660638706.html
