An excellent take on Al Jazeera and the Qatar crisis by a former staffer

An excerpt from the story by Jessica Lourdis, published in the New Republic:
"Al Jazeera was accused, respectively, of being anti-Western, pro-Israel, Islamist, pro-Iraq, anti-religious, and funded by the CIA. It was also enormously popular. By 1999, when the channel began 24-hour broadcasting, it had twelve international bureaus and employed over 500 people.
"After 9/11, the network gained prestige and made an enemy out of the Bush administration by regularly broadcasting interviews with Bin Laden and footage of American airstrikes in Afghanistan, where it was initially one of the only international channels with a camera crew on the ground."
The full story