Al Jazeera International Employees Face “Resistance, Rejection & Racism”

As its Arab owners struggle to launch Al Jazeera International, “those of us who work for the network find ourselves running, at every turn, into resistance, rejection and racism,” Joanne Levine writes in a Washington Post op-ed.

Levine, the executive producer of programming for the Americas at AJI, continues: “Even as al-Jazeera International prepares to open a window onto the world, the doors here are slamming shut. AJI and its employees are being isolated. The network cannot get liability insurance, which severely hampers our ability to hire freelancers and rent equipment. One of the big five U.S. accounting firms won’t touch our business here, even though it is happy to work with us in Doha. The same is true of a major international bank.”

Also, “several employees I know believe they have suffered consequences for joining the network — one was dropped by an adoption agency she once used and another had two rental applications rejected after naming her employer.” Read the rest…