Wadhah Khanfar, who had been the acting director of al-Jazeera since October 2003, has just been named the director general of the network (including not only the al-Jazeera station but also al-Jazeera Direct, which is the Arabic C-Span which al-Hurra might have been, al-Jazeera Kids, al-Jazeera Sports, the other stations, the internet site, and more). According to the al-Jazeera report, he retains all of his current responsibilities with the main station; while it's hard to see how exactly he could have quite as active a role given the additional responsibilities, this doesn't on initial inspection appear to mean that he's being kicked upstairs to make room for someone else.
This is significant because I've long been hearing through the grapevine about the intense politics going on about the naming of a new director, with Wadhah pitted against other candidates who would each represent a likely future trend for al-Jazeera. Some of those candidates may have been, say, viewed more sympathetically by the American government; others might have been, say, more popular in the newsroom. Without going into the many different rumors floated my way, it seems obvious enough that retaining and promoting Wadhah signals continuity in al-Jazeera's approach to things rather than the dramatic changes which appointing someone else might have signaled.
One other point of interest in the short press release: it also puts al-Jazeera International (the English station) under Wadhah's direction. I don't know, but hope to find out, whether that represents a formality or a real change in the management of that new station, which to this point has been under the direction of the largely British team headed by Nigel Parsons. In possibly completely unrelated news, the launch of al-Jazeera International - which Parsons promised would be "before June" in the program he taped with me in Doha - has been delayed until "possibly this summer."
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