Arabian Research on the Activities of the Al-Jazeera During the Qatar Diplomatic Crisis

Abstract

The issues of crisis communications are updated in actual media studies: the editorial policy of various channels that find themselves in a situation of sanctions, boycott, restrictions and prohibitions on their work moves in the focus of media researchers. The experience of successfully overcoming such crises is of interest to researchers, experts, and journalists. Reflecting on Al Jazeera's strategy and tactics during the diplomatic crisis is an example of such an experience. In the Russian-speaking research field, media studies of this topic are insufficiently represented, especially by Arabic-speaking researchers, who revealed the features of Al Jazeera's activities in 2017–2021, during the Qatar crisis. This article is aimed to filling this gap, which provides an overview of articles by authors from different countries who studied the place of Al-Jazeera in the diplomatic crisis, in order to establish the main methods of overcoming the crisis situation by the Al-Jazeera TV channel. The author identifies a number of key positions in the works devoted to the content and editorial policy of Al-Jazeera of this period: 1) the significance of Al-Jazeera's activities as a factor in a crisis situation; 2) the obvious discrepancy between the editorial policy of the TV channel and the state policy of Qatar; 3) two main tactics for building news discourse during the crisis: victimization of the situation in Qatar during the boycott and emphasizing state support for affected citizens; 4) rejection of high standards of professional journalism in favor of suggestive tactics of influencing the audience. The author comes to the conclusion that the activation of the manipulative approach to the presentation of information in times of crisis is the most effective way to overcome the crisis without losing the position of the TV channel in the media space. The scientific significance of such a conclusion correlates to the contribution to the general theory of normative journalism, since the patterns of deviation from normative principles under the conditions of external pressure on the media have been established.