1. Introduction: The Al Jazeera Moment 2. A Strategic Contra-Flow? Al Jazeera-Qatari Relations 3. Editorial Strategies: The Challenges of "Reporting Back" 4. Reversing the News Flow? The News Geography on Al Jazeera English 5. A Voice of the Voiceless: Al Jazeera English's Source Hierarchies 6. Challenging the Spin: The Gaza War 2008-9 7. Suffering Up-Close: Al Jazeera English's Dramatic Visualizations 8. Beyond the Arab Spring: The Structural Contradictions of the Al Jazeera

Tine Ustad Figenschou is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway. Figenschou has published widely on Al Jazeera English, and her work has appeared in Journalism, Media, Culture & Society, Global Media and Communication and International Journal of Communication.

This book analyzes how and why Al Jazeera English (AJE) became the channel of choice to understand the massive protests across the Arab world 2011. Aiming to explain the 'Al Jazeera moment,' it tracks the channel's bumpy road towards international recognition in a longitudinal, in-depth analysis of the channel's editorial profile and strategies. Studying AJE from its launch in mid-November 2006 to the 'Arab Spring', it explains and problematizes the channel's ambitious editorial agenda and strategies, examines the internal conflicts, practical challenges and minor breakthroughs in its formative years.
The Al Jazeera-phenomenon has received massive attention, but it remains under-researched. The growth of transnational satellite television has transformed the global media landscape into a complex web of multi-vocal, multimedia and multi-directional flows. Based on a combination of policy-, production- and content analysis of comprehensive empirical data the book offers an innovative perspective on the theorization of global news contra-flows. By problematizing the distinctive characteristics of AJE, it examines the strategic motivation behind the channel and the ways in which its production processes and news profile are meant to be different from its Anglo-American competitors. These questions underscore a central nexus of the book: the changing relationship between transnational satellite news and power.