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Competition for the regional market of 300 million people is heating up. Netflix (NFLX), Malaysia's Iflix, and Dubai's Starz Play are all vying for dominance

Raina said better broadband capabilities in the region has helped streaming services grow, but payment systems remain a challenge. Credit card use in some parts is still "near zero," he told CNN Business.

The move by Fox comes just over a year after it added 3 new TV channels to its existing line up, including the first Fox-branded channel to broadcast in Arabic.

By adhering to the conservative worldview – newly supercharged by Trump – that all media skews liberal, Baker just may have helped the Journal straddle the divide between readers who want their information from a trustworthy outlet and those typically skeptical of journalism as an institution.

The leaks of Baker’s emails were seen as evidence of rebellion from Journal staffers who felt unduly pressured to go soft on Trump.

a concern many Journal staffers have about the conservative exceptionalism of Baker, who still sometimes writes opinion columns – as he did after Brexit and the US election – in addition to his duties as the paper’s top editor. In particular, staffers past and present worry about editorial coverage seeping into the news side – what one ex-staffer described as “mixing church and state.”

The Journal is the rare publication of record that has managed to largely (though not entirely) escape that “fake news” slur, while – unlike, say, Trump-friendly outlets like Fox News, Breitbart and Sinclair Media Group – maintaining a strong commitment to journalistic standards and facts.

Baker, a British columnist who was promoted from the paper’s deputy role in 2012, came onto Trump’s radar early in the 2016 presidential campaign, when he moderated a Fox Business Network GOP primary debate in November 2015. Trump liked Baker’s handling of the debate, especially compared to that of Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, who had grilled Trump on his treatment of women at an earlier debate in August. During Baker’s debate, the future president largely evaded tough questioning and enjoyed more airtime than anyone else on stage. “He was unbelievably charming afterwards,” Baker said of Trump at the time. “He came up to me and said, ‘That was an extraordinarily elegant debate. You handled it incredibly well.’”

many staffers aren’t satisfied to be the best media voice in the Trump echo chamber, given the Journal’s history as one of the top papers in the country, with 16 newsroom Pulitzer prizes under pre-Murdoch editor Paul Steiger between 1991 and 2007 (only one more has been added in the Murdoch era).

In November, Poynter reported that 48 Journal employees had accepted buyouts – a trend seen across the media industry. In the months that followed, more staffers opted for the door. The departures include two top White House reporters, well-respected political and policy reporters, veteran foreign correspondents, and virtually the entire national security team, some of whom were poached by the Washington Post. Recently, the Journal has made some effort to regroup after the loss of these stars, hiring a number of reporters in its Washington bureau, but not at a rate high enough to replace the talent they have lost and mainly involving more junior reporters.

Some reporters the Guardian spoke with made clear they never felt their stories were compromised and dismissed concerns about Murdoch’s reach and Baker’s meddling, noting that any newsroom includes a healthy back-and-forth between editors and writers. Others said reporters, in the DC bureau especially, have had to fight to get their harder-hitting Trump stories published, if they get published at all. “Almost everyone in the newsroom has a story about their story or a story of a colleague’s getting killed,” said a reporter. “That happens in all newspapers, but the killings run in one direction.”

“There are growing indications that Mr Murdoch, a lifelong conservative, doesn’t just want to cover politics, he wants to play them as well,” David Carr, the late media critic, wrote in 2009, two years after Murdoch bought the paper. Carr noted that Baker, as early as 2010, when he was deputy managing editor, was already seen as pushing the WSJ into “adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the [Obama] administration”. Murdoch has been known to use his publications to influence politics and business alike.

last year an ahead-of-the-curve piece on white supremacist Richard Spencer and the rise of the alt-right ran online – and was buzzworthy enough to be cited by Hillary Clinton. But it was spiked from the paper because Baker felt it unfair to make a connection between Trump and white nationalists, according to multiple sources in the newsroom at the time.

Recently, a reporter in the Washington bureau was chided by an editor for a tweet regarding Trump’s effects on the stock market, which was deemed to be too sharp on Trump, according to a colleague.

“Gerry’s saying ‘just report the facts’, but there’s a difference between journalism and stenography.”

The United Arab Emirates is home to 37 international branch campuses, which serve its large expatriate population. The government of Abu Dhabi, part of the U.A.E., is also financing lavish new campuses for New York University and the Sorbonne.

universities here must also obtain security clearances to hire academics, organize conferences, and invite speakers. In the wake of the Arab Spring, authorities have tightened restrictions on freedom of expression and arrested nearly a hundred human-rights activists and Islamists they accuse of plotting to overthrow the state

Dubai International Academic City, a "free zone" that is home to dozens of foreign universities

our subject is engineering. We don't teach politics

public insults to reporters from CNN, the Economist and the BBC, notably when the 2013 Gezi Park protests provided media outlets with gripping images of tear-gassed protesters

While TRT World has hired expensive expatriate talent and technical staff, other Turkish journalists have been jailed, their newspapers closed and their careers ended over material the government deems offensive. In 2015 Reporters without Borders ranked Turkey 149th in the world for press freedom, behind South Sudan and Palestine

most of the foreign employees contacted by the FT privately expressed concern they had signed up to a project that would become halfway between state propaganda and an expression of Turkish soft power. “If we’re not careful, we end up a joke,” says a senior news staffer who is already considering quitting

Mr van Meek, a veteran of Fox News and Al Jazeera, rejects such criticism and says the channel’s coverage will be a measure of its independence: “Watch the content. I think we are fair and objective and credible.”

live broadcasts that are available online and as part of Turkish cable bundles. Yet almost nobody outside the country can yet watch it on television.

The benefits of being under the public broadcaster’s umbrella are apparent. During two recent high-profile terrorism incidents, TRT World was able to break a nationwide ban and broadcast live from the scene, while others had to rely on studio interviews.

its headcount has swelled to at least 220 in Istanbul, with additional centers in London, Singapore and Washington

Industry analysts estimate annual running costs at £50m-£100m, rising further if the channel develops a large network of correspondents. RT’s annual budget is about £125m.

“If you had $100m to improve the state of Turkish media, would you spend it on a glasshouse in the middle of Istanbul?” says Andrew Finkel, founder of P24, an organisation that aims to strengthen independent reporting in Turkey. “Why are public funds being used this way?”

Compared with other risks to human life and well-being, contemporary international terrorism remains a minor problem

The Islamic State killed 31 people in Brussels on Tuesday, but more than half a billion people in Europe were just fine on that day. So when the British government raised the “threat level” and told its citizens to avoid “all but essential travel” to Belgium following Tuesday’s attacks, it is demonstrating a decidedly non-Churchillian panic. Needless to say, that is precisely what groups like the Islamic State want to provoke.

the same toxic blend of media and politics that brought us Donald Trump’s candidacy makes it nearly impossible to have a rational assessment of terrorism

Newspapers, radio, cable news channels, and assorted websites all live for events like this, and they know that hyping the danger will keep people reading, listening, and watching. The Islamic State and its partners really couldn’t ask for a better ally, because overheated media coverage makes weak groups seem more powerful than they really are and helps convince the public they are at greater risk than is in fact the case. As long as media coverage continues to provide the Islamic State et al. with such free and effective publicity, why should these groups ever abandon such tactics?

The Islamic State wouldn’t have to use terrorism if it were strong enough to advance its cause through normal means or if its message were attractive enough to command the loyalty of more than a miniscule fraction of the world’s population (or the world’s Muslims, for that matter). Because it lacks abundant resources and its message is toxic to most people, the Islamic State has to rely on suicide attacks, beheadings, and violent videos to try to scare us into doing something stupid. The Islamic State cannot conquer Europe and impose its weird version of Islam on the more than 500 million people who live there; the most it can hope for is to get European countries to do self-destructive things to themselves in response. Similarly, neither al Qaeda, the Islamic State, nor other extremists could destroy the U.S. economy, undermine the U.S. military, or weaken American resolve directly; but they did achieve some of their goals when they provoked us into invading Iraq and when they convinced two presidents to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the bottomless pit in Afghanistan.

Terrorism is not really the problem; the problem is how we respond to it

At the moment, the challenge of contemporary terrorism seems to be bringing out not the best in the West — but the worst. Instead of resolution and grit, we get bluster and hyperbole. Instead of measured threat assessments, patient and careful strategizing, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be achieved, we get symbolic gestures, the abandonment of our own principles, and political posturing.

how would a grown-up like Marshall or Dwight D. Eisenhower respond to this danger? No doubt they’d see it as a serious problem, but anyone who had witnessed the carnage of a world war would not be cowed by intermittent acts of extremist violence, no matter how shocking they are to our sensibilities. They’d use the bully pulpit to shame the fearmongers on Fox and CNN, and they’d never miss an opportunity to remind us that the danger is not, in fact, that great and that we should not, and cannot, live our lives in fear of every shadow and in thrall to monsters of our own imaginings. They would encourage us to live our daily lives as we always have, confident that our societies possess a strength and resilience that will easily outlast the weak and timorous groups that are trying to disrupt us. And then, this summer, they’d take a European vacation.

While citizen journalism accounts for a large slice of viewership on YouTube, its users are also eager distributers of professional news video. The study shows YouTube as a global news arena where professional and amateur video bleed together, and is made consumable in on-demand style.

A relatively nascent new organization, Russia Today, a network founded in 2005 and backed by the Russian government that often reports rumor, had easily the most videos among the most-viewed. The second most-viewed news organization among the top videos was Fox News, although the study pointed out that more than half of those videos were posted in criticism of the network.

Sozcu, Turkey’s bestselling opposition paper with a secularist and nationalist outlook, hailed the opposition winning control of Ankara for the first time in 25 years, and called the contested results in Istanbul “like an April Fools’ Day joke".

A notable analysis by the newspaper was the CHP’s success in moving beyond coastal areas and winning provinces in heartland Anatolia, once considered the AKP's powerbase.

Leftist daily Birgun had a bold front page headline, saying “People said 'halt' to pressure, violence and threats” by the government.

The paper also featured a story on the victory of Turkey’s first-ever communist city mayor in Tunceli. Interestingly, the conservative Star daily’s columnist Ardan Zenturk also hailed communist mayor Fatih Mehmet Macoglu for his courage.

television viewing figures suggested that many viewers had turned to Fox TV, one of the few private news channels to take a critical stance towards the government, for their election night coverage, with six of the night's most watched programmes screening on the network.

"Ironically, government supporters themselves don’t read pro-government newspapers. Best-selling newspapers lost their circulation after they were seized by government-friendly businesspeople."

Ismail Caglar, an analyst at Ankara-based conservative think tank SETA, says Turkey’s rising profile in the region attracts foreign interest. Foreign companies make media investments in Turkey to propagate their point of view and take part in domestic political debates, he said

A report by US government-funded think tank the Rand Corporation said last year that Sputnik Turkiye and other Russian media outlets were trying to undermine NATO by fomenting mutual suspicion between Turkey and its Western allies, enlisting Ankara’s support and impeding its opposition to Russian actions in the Middle East.

Sputnik Turkiye published an article on 2 December 2015 with the headline “Russia: Erdogan and His Family Directly Involved in ISIS’s Illegal Oil Shipment in Syria”. Turkey later banned Sputnik Turkiye’s website and revoked its bureau chief’s work permit and visa, but Sputnik Turkiye radio continued to broadcast. Following the rapprochement between two countries in 2016, Sputnik Turkiye’s website began to freely operate again. Its Twitter account has roughly 600,000 followers.

"As Turks look for fresh perspectives and alternate sources of information in a tightly controlled media environment, Sputnik Turkiye draws readers in through its shockingly open coverage on domestic issues,"

Other outlets, such as Germany's Deutsche Welle Turkce, have also taken a generally critical line. Prominent journalist Nevsin Mengu, whose newscasts on YouTube are watched by thousands of Turks, has recently joined its ranks.

BBC Turkce, which has been broadcasting since 1939, is known for an editorial style perceived to be critical of the current Turkish government. 

“There is this sense that stories edging on activist journalism have been regularly published because they think it will generate traffic,” 

BBC Turkce has more than 3 million followers on Twitter.

Caglar, the SETA analyst who is also preparing a report on the subject, criticised BBC Turkce for being opaque about its staffing and operational information. “They didn’t even want to acknowledge with how many people they have in their staff.”

Ali Duran Topuz, the editor-in-chief of independent news portal Gazete Duvar, told MEE that the current media structure in Turkey made it easier for foreign-owned outlets to operate. “It could be also financially profitable for the investors. Fox, for example, is mildly criticising the government and it posts profit. Because of large numbers of unemployed journalists, the labour cost is also very low,"

Just 100 years ago this June, armed whites rampaged through East St. Louis, slaughtering more than 100 African-Americans. In Tulsa in 1921, white mobs attacked a wealthy black neighborhood, killing as many as 300 people and leaving 8,000 homeless in what was wrongly labeled a “race riot” and left out of history texts until recently.

after mass attacks perpetrated by brown Muslim assailants, such as the Orlando Pulse massacre or the San Bernardino, California, killings, the media, authorities and politicians were quick to label them “terrorism” even before we had full information

Just because someone’s angry or even mentally ill doesn’t mean their actions aren’t those of a domestic terrorist (see U.S. Code definition above). As Joshua Keating points out in Slate, being distraught and a terrorist are “not mutually exclusive.” A 2013 study of violence by far-right extremists in America in Criminology and Public Policy found 40 percent of “lone wolf” domestic terrorists had a history of mental illness

Fox News dubiously described the shooter’s father’s life as “colorful,” as if it were entertaining that the man’s father robbed a string of banks, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and busted out of a federal penitentiary. Can you imagine a black, Muslim or Latino’s long criminal record being described in the same way?

Underlying this bias is the implication that Muslims or brown immigrants are more dangerous to Americans’ safety than white attackers. That is provably false, based on government statistics – yet it was the central narrative of President Trump’s campaign

according to an analysis by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh of fatal terrorism on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2015 – including the staggeringly high toll of the 9/11 attacks – the chances of an American being killed in a terror attack on U.S. soil by a foreigner was a miniscule 1 in 3.6 million per year. The chances of being killed by an illegal immigrant in the same 41-year period was an infinitesimal 1 in 10.9 billion per year.

In 2017, FDD received $3.63 million from billionaire Bernard Marcus, which constituted over a quarter of FDD’s contributions that year. Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, is outspoken about his hatred of Iran, which he characterized as “the devil” in a 2015 Fox Business interview. Marcus is Trump’s second biggest campaign supporter, contributing $7 million to pro-Trump super PACs before the 2016 election.

by the end of the 2011 tax year, Sheldon Adelson, who went on to become Trump’s single biggest campaign funder, the GOP’s biggest funder in the 2018 midterms, and personal advocate for Trump to take Bolton as his national security adviser, was FDD’s third biggest donor, contributing at least $1.5 million. (Dubowitz says Adelson no longer contributes to FDD.) In 2013, Adelson publicly proposed the U.S. launch a preventive nuclear attack on Iran, targeting the desert, and threaten to launch a second nuclear weapon at Tehran if Iran didn’t abandon its nuclear program.

the Trump administration’s decision to seemingly enter into a collaborative arrangement with FDD or Ghasseminejad, an FDD “adviser,” points to the State Department, under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s leadership, moving to increasingly align itself with organizations and individuals pushing the U.S. towards another war in the Middle East.

Marcus and Adelson publicly endorse a militarist posture towards Iran and aren’t shy about writing big checks to politicians and organizations that share that mission. With Adelson and Marcus’s preferred national security adviser, John Bolton, evidently pushing the U.S. towards a military confrontation with Iran, it’s no wonder that FDD, possibly (until Friday) with the support of U.S.-taxpayer funding, is engaged in a public-diplomacy campaign against critics of Trump and Bolton’s Iran policy.

The $50 million investment represents a significant minority stake in Newsmax, a privately held media company estimated to be worth between $100 million and $200 million

Though it was not mentioned by name, Heritage was described in the January federal indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) as having “ties to the Government of Qatar.” The indictment alleges that a Qatari government official associated with the investment firm provided Menendez’s family members with tickets to the Formula One race in Miami. The Post has previously reported that the unnamed firm in the indictment matches the description of Heritage. The firm is not accused of wrongdoing.

Other investments by Heritage Advisors in recent years include a Miami-based real estate developer, a professional soccer team in Indiana, and The News Movement, a media entity launched in 2020 to target a Gen Z audience and co-founded by William Lewis, who became publisher of The Post this year.

“We were not allowed to criticize Qatar,” one of these people said. “We were told very clearly from the top down, no touching this.” Ruddy verbally reprimanded a female host in 2018 for her on-air comments about Qatar, according to two other people who saw the exchange.

Ruddy’s relationship with Trump was a major selling point as his representatives attempted to secure a large investment from Qatar

Qatar launched an expensive and wide-ranging effort to convince the Trump administration of its value as a regional partner. It paid for a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military facility in the Middle East, and signed a $12 billion deal with U.S. defense contractor Boeing to buy F-15 fighter jets. Qatar’s emir visited Washington in April 2018 and July 2019, where he met with Trump and signed billions of dollars in business deals.

According to a report released on Jan. 4 by House Democrats, the Qatari government paid over $460,000 during Trump’s presidency to Trump World Tower in New York City for properties it owned, and in 2018 members of Qatar’s ruling family spent more than $280,000 at Washington, D.C.’s Trump International Hotel. In August 2018, a firm that had received significant financial backing from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund also bailed out a company controlled by the family of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, on a troubled Manhattan real estate investment.

A person familiar with Qatar’s strategy at the time said that it wanted to cultivate a sympathetic conservative outlet in the United States and considered Fox News too close to Saudi Arabia, as a Saudi prince previously held a 6 percent stake in the outlet’s parent company. This person said they were told by a Qatari official that the emirate “wanted to push every lever they had to establish better relations in Washington.”

Heritage Advisors employees began preparations to transfer the Newsmax stake into the Cayman Islands corporate structure on Nov. 10, 2020, one week after Trump’s election loss.