Frustrated by coverage of Gaza, student protesters turn to Al Jazeera

Nick Wilson has been following the news about the war in Gaza closely since October. But Mr. Wilson, a Cornell student, is picky about his media diet: As a pro-Palestinian activist, he doesn’t trust the reporting of the Israeli campaign in Gaza by major American media outlets.

Instead, he turns to publications that are less known to some American audiences, such as the Arabic news network Al Jazeera.

“Al Jazeera is the site I go to to report on events that I think are reliable,” he said.

Many student protesters said in recent interviews that they were looking for on-the-ground coverage of the war in Gaza, and often a staunchly pro-Palestinian perspective — and that they were turning to alternative media to do so. There are a range of options: Jewish Currents, The Intercept, Mondoweiss and even independent Palestinian journalists on social media, as they seek information about what is happening in Gaza.

Their preferences embody a broader shift for members of Generation Z, who increasingly looking for news from a wider range of sources and questioning old channels in a fragmented media ecosystem.

Israel’s recent ban on Al Jazeera’s local operations has only increased the network’s standing among many protesting students. They value reporting from reporters on the ground, and Al Jazeera has a more extensive operation in Gaza than any other publication. Students also noted the sacrifices involved in telling the story there. Two Al Jazeera journalists have died since the start of the war.

“Al Jazeera kind of fills a role for a lot of younger Americans in that they get a different perspective than they think they get from the American media,” said Ben Toff, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota.

While many Western media outlets, with few or no journalists in Gaza before the war, have struggled to gain access to the area, Al Jazeera is recognized for its raw, searing depictions of the death and destruction there. A typical report might show video of Israeli tanks rolling into towns, alongside drone footage of flattened buildings in Gaza City and Palestinians fleeing their homes.

“It’s news about the Middle East, and it doesn’t really convey it in a Western perspective,” said Alina Atiq, a student at the University of South Florida who has urged her university to withdraw from Israel.

The Qatari-owned network is headquartered in Doha and operates two separate newsrooms that offer English- and Arabic-language content. Its mobile apps have been downloaded 295,000 times in the United States since October, up more than 200 percent from the previous seven months, according to Appfigures, a market research firm.

Among the outlets often cited by protesters, Al Jazeera English is by far the most popular on social media. It has 1.9 million followers on TikTok — up from about 750,000 at the start of the war — and 4.6 million on Instagram.

Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, described the network’s Arabic-language channel as more openly pro-Palestinian than the English-language channel, which he said has a more subtle slant.

Critics say the reporting is about springs in support of the armed resistance against Israel. The Israeli government, which has accused Al Jazeera of acting as a “mouthpiece” for Hamas, seized its broadcasting equipment on Sunday and halted its operations in the country for at least 45 days.

Al Jazeera called the government’s accusation “baseless” in a statement, adding that it has broadcast every press conference of the Israeli cabinet and representatives of the Israeli defense forces, as well as videos from Hamas.

It also said the reporting “offers diverse viewpoints and stories and counter-narratives,” and that allegations of pro-Palestinian bias “must be investigated through careful analysis of our journalistic standards and reporting practices.”

The Israeli government’s rejection of Al Jazeera appears to have boosted the network’s reputation among some students.

“It shows how much Israel is afraid of Al Jazeera’s coverage and reporting,” said Matthew Vickers, a junior at Occidental College in Los Angeles who has been active in trying to convince his school to divest from companies with ties to Israel. Israel.

The protesters rattled off a list of mainstream American publications whose coverage they found objectionable, including CNN, The Atlantic and The New York Times. While major news outlets have reported extensively on Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the death toll and the damage, the student protesters’ coverage has not attributed enough blame to Israel for the Palestinian deaths, nor has it thoroughly fact-checked Israeli officials. And they said coverage of the protests has focused too much on anti-Semitism on college campuses, rather than Islamophobia.

“There is a fair amount of disinformation that is being fed to us by the mainstream media, and there is a clear bias when it comes to the Palestinian issue,” said Cameron Jones, a student at Columbia University and organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian organization.

The activists’ interest in Al Jazeera stands in contrast to the network’s past struggles to find an audience in the United States. The network launched a U.S. channel in 2013, but shut it down in 2016 with nightly ratings hovering around 30,000, far below the viewership of cable networks like Fox News and CNN.

Part of what doomed the network back then was “a clear anti-American slant” in its reporting, Mr. Ibish wrote in a 2016 guest essay for The Times. But now, broadcast from another country, the network’s tone is finding its audience on college campuses, he said.

“There is a third world, anti-imperialist position, and that is also the position that many students have adopted,” he said.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed to the reporting.