This is a sad tale because Al Jazeera’s will­ing­ness to air con­tro­ver­sial news was a shin­ing light in an oth­er­wise dark void of cor­po­rate media.

Although those rulers estab­lished the chan­nel a decade ago in large part as a forum for crit­ics of the Saudi gov­ern­ment, they now seem to feel they can­not con­tinue to alien­ate Saudi Ara­bia — a fel­low Sunni nation — in light of the threat from Iran across the Gulf.

The specter of Iran’s nuclear ambi­tions may be par­tic­u­larly daunt­ing to tiny Qatar, which also is the site of a major Amer­i­can mil­i­tary base.
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The new pol­icy is the lat­est chap­ter in a grad­ual domes­ti­ca­tion of Al Jazeera, once reviled by Amer­i­can offi­cials as lit­tle more than a ter­ror­ist pro­pa­ganda out­let. Al Jazeera’s broad­casts no longer rou­tinely refer to Iraqi insur­gents as the “resis­tance,” or vic­tims of Amer­i­can fire­power as “martyrs.”

The pol­icy also illus­trates the way the Arab media, despite the new free­doms intro­duced by Al Jazeera itself a decade ago, are still often treated as polit­i­cal tools by the region’s auto­cratic rulers.

Of course, the expla­na­tion is always the ‘Iran­ian threat’ (the Jerusalem Post even has a spe­cial head­ing of that name) but the real dri­ving force his energy, fos­sil fuel and the world’s ever increas­ing demands for the ever dwin­dling sup­ply. Why then not focus on renew­able energy?

UPDATE:Al Ara­biya claims to have had a hand in rein­ing in Al Jazeera