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🎉 Happy New Year, same old fears

It’s the new year, and while that means joyous celebration of the new and humble reflection of the old (one sentence in and we’re already diving into semiotics aka the study of signs and symbols and their meaning), the news, unfortunately, was devastatingly tragic over the holidays.

Not wanting to focus on a specific tragic story, I thought it would be more interesting to see what news was reported on the first day of the year from two global news websites. Their strikingly different editorial policies were made abundantly evident on their homepages.

Both screenshots were taken on the international homepages of Al Jazeera and the BBC News website above the fold. Both were taken exactly on 1st January, at 11:40pm Singapore time. Reason being it was close enough to the end of the day here that all parts of the world had rung in the new year and other news would’ve floated to the top. Coincidentally, both news websites were running live updates on a quickly evolving news story.

It wasn’t the same story though. So let’s start, alphabetically, with AJ.

🇶🇦 Al Jazeera: New Year’s Day massacre: Israel kills dozens of Palestinians in Gaza

📢 What Al Jazeera is saying
Al Jazeera, being based out of Doha in Qatar, has been focused quite closely on the Israel-Gaza conflict from the very beginning, if not even earlier. The homepage, and the live updates, are dedicated to this story.

1. 📸 Visuals

Al Jazeera’s homepage is split into three columns, with the leftmost column being the widest, and dedicated to the main story of the hour - in this case it’s the latest Israel strikes against Gaza. This is framed by a photo of a Gazan family of, we can assume, a father and two children, which look to be a boy on the left and a girl in the middle. The boy is probably early teens, with the girl a few years younger. Tellingly, the father, sitting on the right, does not look very old himself. All look exhausted, if not a bit gaunt.

All three are dressed in full sleeved hoodies and socks, and it can be inferred that the weather is cold. Above them hang a variety of clothes, which can be interpreted to be theirs. Behind them hangs a sheet, used like a makeshift wall, indicating some kind of division, like a room, where they sit. The overall image this portrays is one of a camp; not a permanent settlement but a temporary one.

The middle column of the page, which is narrower, leads with a much smaller photo of a New Orleans road crossing, either at dusk or dawn, showing a fire engine on the right, and a mounted policeman on the left. A yellow ‘POLICE DO NOT CROSS’ tape cuts across the bottom of the photo, pulling focus.

Other images on the homepage are, in my view, too small to garner any real attention.

2. ✍🏽 Words

The main headline (“New Year’s Day massacre […]”) grabs attention immediately. It feels like a play on the 1929 Chicago gang shooting dubbed the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. The juxtaposition of the two ideas - mass killing on a holiday - stands out. There are several more lines of text under it, albeit smaller, which are time stamped, indicating several news stories related to the same topic - this is story that’s being updated in real time.

The second column also has a ‘live updates’ tag, but simply links to the main story (in this case, the attack in New Orleans). Other stories sit under a few different titles, including ‘Must Read’, ‘More Headlines’, and ‘Opinion’, and smaller still are two stories under ‘Exclusive’.

These other stories relate, geographically, to Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Russia and Ukraine, Azerbaijan, China and the US, India and Sri Lanka, South Korea, and global sports.

The focus, however, remains on the main story in Gaza, both visually and textually, despite the story out of New Orleans being more recent.

❓ What it means
It’s abundantly clear that for Al Jazeera, their intention is to highlight the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza, especially on a day when news about celebrating the change of the calendar might drown out similar news. Or, in fact, any other news. However, being a global news network, they still ensure that they cover news stories from around the world. There is a minor mention of sports, but that’s about it.

This highlights Al Jazeera’s editorial policy clearly: above the fold stories will be focused on the Middle East. For other geographies, you’re going to have to scroll down. And the organisation will not let you forget, even on New Year’s Day, about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza.

⚠️ Why it matters
Al Jazeera’s birth is a fascinating story. The TL;DR is that it was started when the Emir, or ruler, of Qatar threw a financial lifeline to a few hundred BBC-trained Arabic speaking journalists who were out of work after BBC Arabic, a short-lived joint venture between the BBC and Saudi Arabia, was forced to shut down abruptly in the mid-90s. The reason for the closure is generally understood to be Saudi interference relating to a BBC documentary about executions in the Kingdom, but I also read somewhere that it had to do with a supposed mistaken broadcast of explicit (read: pornographic) material into Saudi Arabia.

Regardless, the TV channel built a reputation of controversial programming - in the early years, they often broadcast panel discussions about taboo subjects in Islam, and played taped speeches of Bin Laden sent by Al Qaeda to the channel. Truth was that no one in the region had ever been exposed to an Arab-based news channel quite like this one. Ask anyone in any part of the region, and at some point they have been angry at Al Jazeera for their coverage, whether they were Saudi, Egyptian, or Emirati (which led to the political and actual blockade of Qatar by its neighbours from 2017 to 2021).

Being part-owned and financed by the Qatari royal family meant they were flush with cash to build the best infrastructure, and were populated by BBC-trained Arabic speaking journalists, which at the time was absolutely unique. Being a globally focused news channel based out of the Middle East, they have had a front row seat to events like the Arab Spring, the wars in Iraq, Syria, Israel and Gaza, conflicts in Lebanon, and much more.

There is no shortage of news in the region, and, generally speaking, Al Jazeera has looked to cover it all professionally and from a position of authority, often having offices in places like the West Bank and Ramallah where other news organisations don’t (updates on this below). They focus primarily on reporting news stories from the Middle East and what can be termed as the Global South, as a counter programming to English and American global news channels.

🇬🇧 BBC News: Suspect in New Orleans attack that killed 10 is dead and FBI investigating as ‘act of terrorism’

📢 What BBC News is saying
The BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, has instead focused its news coverage on the attack in New Orleans, also providing live updates as the story developed.

1. 📸 Visuals

Immediately, we notice that the design of the homepage is different. At the top of the page, and going two-thirds the way across the page, is the main story, the vehicular attack in New Orleans in the United States. Below it are four other stories, and on the right are three other stories. Only five of those eight stories have an accompanying image.

The image used for the main story is that of a pickup truck, which can be inferred to be the one used for the attack. The view is from the outside, and it shows us only the back, so there’s not much detail that we can understand from it, aside from the fact that it’s a pickup truck in white.

The four images below the main story relate to the stories that they accompany. In order, they are: the plane crash in Jeju in South Korea, a picture of a rural girl from India approaching with a ball in her hand, a picture of a man on the extreme right of the photo looking over the horizon, and a designed photo of a zoomed in flag of China with a laptop superimposed.

The remaining photo, to the right of the main photo, is also about the attack in New Orleans, and shows a night scene with police cars and blue sirens.

2. ✍🏽 Words

The main headline is uncharacteristically wordy, but does deliver a few details: the suspect who caused the attack is dead, the attack killed 10 people, and the police are investigating the crime as an ‘act of terrorism’ (quotations not mine). The focus is, quite clearly, on the story coming out of the United States. It is also tagged ‘live’, indicating several news stories along with continuous, up-to-date coverage of this particular story.

The other stories on the page cover the following geographies: South Korea, India, Sri Lanka, US and China, some more supporting stories to the main story, along with Puerto Rico, which is also part of the United States. Interestingly, not all the stories on the page are, strictly speaking, breaking news. The story from India relates to a famous cricketer making a village girl famous (lighter news). The story from Sri Lanka is a feature on Sri Lankan politics (opinions feature). The support stories to the main story are eye-witness accounts and a summary of the events to the incident in New Orleans.

❓ What it means
It’s night and day, isn’t it? And I’m not only talking about the photos used for the story of New Orleans between Al Jazeera and the BBC. Altogether five stories on the BBC News homepage relate to news from the United States, with three connected to the same story. Geographically, the coverage is not as broad as Al Jazeera.

The story coverage about the plane crash in South Korea is the only one that is global hard news outside of the coverage of the United States. The two stories from India and Sri Lanka are opinion features rather than breaking news. Incidentally, both India and Sri Lanka are former British colonies.

In this isolated snapshot, the focus is clear: if it’s not a story about, or in relation to the United States, with whom the British famously share a Special Relationship, or about former colonies, it is unlikely to get prime real estate on the homepage.

Finally, the quotations around the phrase ‘act of terrorism’ is telling - it basically means that American law enforcement are viewing the attack as another example of Islamic extremist violence. However, the use of quotation marks can be read thus - one, that it’s a direct quote from a spokesperson or media release, and two, that the propensity to call only Islamic extremist violence in the United States as terrorism, but not other religious-based violence, or any other type of violence, as terrorism, is not the editorial policy of the BBC.

⚠️ Why it matters
One of the best pieces of advice I received as a media studies student was that to understand exactly who the audience of a news organisation is, even if they claim to serve a global audience, with strict and exacting editorial standards, is to check the sports section.

In this case, we don’t need to go that far. We can stay on the homepage. With an unrelenting focus on the United States (including a story about alleged state-backed Chinese hacks of American assets), one could almost be forgiven for thinking that the BBC is American, and not British. However, this could also be interpreted differently - to the BBC, and perhaps to most of it’s readers, the news of the United States 🇺🇸 trumps (pun very much not intended) the news out of any other part of the world.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine that the BBC did not have a set of stories lined up for the 1st of January, when most people are off, and likely so are a lot of their own staff (and why shouldn’t they be?). Which is why we have a few feature articles and opinion pieces on the homepage that are more evergreen, possibly written previously.

WHAT’S GOING ON? 

📰 What qualifies as news worth knowing?

We live in an age where the news outlet you follow acts as a siren of your politics, values, and belief systems. If you follow the BBC, it’s likely you enjoy it’s global coverage through a British-Anglophone lens. If you prefer Al Jazeera, then it’s likely you appreciate it’s counter-programming to the more Anglophone news organisations, and more in-depth focus of stories out of the Middle East and Global South.

Both news organisations can, and have, been accused of bias and inaccuracies. Looking at their homepages is reason enough to speculate. It is intriguing that for the BBC, the latest Israel-Gaza conflict isn’t immediate enough to feature above the fold. But before anybody accuses the BBC of anti-Arab or pro-Israel sentiment, it should also be reiterated that there is no mention of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war either, even though I’m sure there were movements on the ground on New Year’s Day.

Al Jazeera, despite being bankrolled by the Qatari government, does not have the same reputation as TRT of Turkey, RT of Russia, CCTV of China, or any other state-sponsored public broadcaster. This is despite the fact that, depending on whom you ask in the Middle East, Al Jazeera is unnecessarily controversial, fiercely independent, or simply follow an editorial policy of equal opportunity offenders (as I write this, Al Jazeera have been forced to suspend their operations and close their offices in both Ramallah and the West Bank, having offended both sides in the conflict). Except for offending Qatar.

Ultimately, your decision to read or follow any single news source shouldn’t mean you don’t question the decisions behind their coverage, or try to understand what its meant to make you think. Signpost is here to help you do that.

Read widely. Question thoroughly. Decide accordingly.

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