The article examines Al Jazeera’s internal guidelines. It focuses attention on the broadcaster’s editorial policies and practices, how they are created, the way they shape news content, and whether they are documented or not. It attempts to shed light on the role of external stakeholders and regulatory devices with a say on the editorial line and subsequently the type of internal editorial policies and practices journalists are required to pursue. It presents a comparative study and analysis of the network’s two major and most influential channels, namely Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English, the arguments in support of their editorial policies and practices, and the arguments opposing them. It scrutinizes how different forms of internal guidelines and regulatory frameworks affect the network’s discourse, ties with its financiers, and relations with the outside world. Finally and based on the findings obtained through interviews, and linguistic discourse analysis, the article outlines how internal guidelines come into being in the case of Al Jazeera and how they eventually influence the final product. 

Hacked and leaked content has become a major source of information for the mainstream news, particularly in the years since Donald Trump snatched the official Republican presidential nomination in 2016. This chapter seeks to identify some salient policies and practices the news media have adopted in their coverage of the rise of Trump to power. Indeed, there is a plethora of literature on the role hackers and leakers as well as news fakers play in today’s journalism (Eggen, 2006; Gunkel, 2005; Jaworski, Fitzgerald, & Morris, 2004; Lievrouw, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Son, 2002; Vegh, 2003). We even have a new theory with a set of principles designed to test, interpret, and predict the phenomenon. Called “haktology,” the theory examines the processes of gaining illegal and unauthorized access to information, its subsequent disclosure to reporters and activists, its transmutation into news reports, and the impact such reports leave on public opinion.

This article analyses a special case to illustrate paradigmatic rectification in news production that took place at the turn of the century. The special case concerns Tony Burman, a former head of Canada’s CBC and former managing director of the global news channel Al Jazeera English. Burman drew the journalistic community’s attention through ‘editorial remedies’ that saw the emergence of a special way of news coverage rarely practised by mainstream western media. Burman’s news model holds that all people or actors involved in an event determined newsworthy are equal and matter to the story in the same way regardless of their power. This article examines Burman’s news model as a shared mindset among members of a 24/7 news organization, focusing on the principles of objectivity, event and news values.