Commentary: Why Al Jazeera America Failed

Jordan Weissmann says that Al Jazeera America’s name and Quatari pedigree may have had a role in its demise, but its bigger problem was its content. “The channel was founded on the utterly ill-conceived idea that Americans were starving for sober, ‘unbiased’ hard news coverage,” he writes. “It made the mistake of offering viewers the programming they claimed to want, instead of the programming that all available evidence suggests they actually enjoy.”