I am shocked. Shocked I tell you!
The former head of Al Jazeera America’s documentary unit has sued the news network, claiming it is biased against non-Arabs and women in stories that it produces and in how it treats employees.
Shannon High-Bassalik, fired in February after working through half of a three-year contract, said the network’s recently ousted chief executive, Ehab Al Shihabi, left meetings when women were speaking and admitted that he tried to favor an Arab point of view on the air to please Ajam’s Qatar-based ownership.
Al Jazeera America called High-Bassalik’s accusations unfounded and said she made none of them during an investigation of her employment record conducted by an outside law firm.
—-
“As ratings failed to live up to the expectations of management, Al Jazeera openly decided to abandon all pretense of neutrality in favor of putting the Arabic viewpoint front and center, openly demanding that programs be aired that criticized countries such as America, Israel and Egypt,” High-Bassalik’s lawsuit stated.
She said she was told that if abandonment of journalistic integrity led people to regard them as terrorists, “that was an acceptable risk for the company to take”.
High-Bassalik said that Al Shihabi told her that the company should be regarded as Al Jazeera in America, rather than Al Jazeera America.
—-
She accused the head of the company’s investigative unit of tweeting that “Israelis are like Hitler”. During coverage of the 2014 conflict in Gaza, she said she was told the mission was to cast Israel as the villain and emphasize the Arab and Muslim point of view.
