Yara Darwish: ‘Qatar Would Love TV like Al Jazeera America’

Al Jazeera now runs three television channels, including the newly-launched Al Jazeera America. The station is based in Qatar. But the kind of journalism Al Jazeera does is still a pipe-dream in that country.

Northwestern University in Qatar journalism student Yara Darwish said of her countrymen, including her parents, “they actually have no clue of what journalism is. The culture in Qatar hasn’t allowed them to accept the idea of journalism. We are not a society that shares everything, that shares the news; we are a very private society.

“I wanted to join the journalism field because I really wanted to change how journalism is perceived in Qatar. To be honest, when I told my parents I wanted to study journalism they weren’t too happy about that, the fact that I’m studying journalism. And the reason they didn’t want me studying journalism is that they didn’t understand it.”