Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Al Jazeera, Ethiopia, and the Politics of Selective Outrage
Perhaps the most intellectually dishonest feature of Al Jazeera’s recent Ethiopia coverage is what it refuses to remember. Ethiopia is home to one of Africa’s largest refugee populations not as a transit country, but as a host. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have found sanctuary on Ethiopian soil. Syrians who fled the catastrophic civil war that Al Jazeera covered with such sustained passion built lives in Addis Ababa, opened businesses, integrated into communities, welcomed, for the most part, without the violent xenophobia that has disfigured the response of certain wealthier nations considerably better placed to absorb displacement. This is an extraordinary humanitarian record. Al Jazeera, so reliably attentive to refugee suffering when it serves a particular narrative, has shown remarkably little interest in it here.
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By Endex The Ethiopian Tribune editor in chief
Opinion & Analysis
There is a particular kind of arrogance embedded in the way certain international media institutions cover Africa. It is not always the arrogance of open hostility that would at least be straightforward to contest. It is, rather, the arrogance of the editorial template: the quiet, institutional assumption that a continent of fifty-four nations and a billion-plus souls can be adequately explained through a rotating cast of familiar imagery famine, fragmentation, and failure. Ethiopia has endured this treatment for decades. What demands urgent examination today is not merely that it persists, but who is perpetuating it, why, and what Ethiopia ought to do in response.
Al Jazeera, the Doha-based broadcaster funded by the Qatari state, has positioned itself globally as the voice of the underdog, the challenger of Western media hegemony, the outlet that speaks truth to power. It is a seductive proposition, and in certain contexts, notably its early coverage of the Arab Spring, it was not without merit. Yet when the camera turns toward Ethiopia, something rather revealing happens to that self-proclaimed editorial conscience. The underdog disappears. The complexity vanishes. What remains is a country rendered perpetually crisis-ridden, politically naïve, and diplomatically inconsequential.
This is not an accident. It is a pattern, and patterns in journalism are never merely stylistic.
The Architecture of a Double Standard
Academic scrutiny of Al Jazeera’s reporting on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has produced findings that should embarrass any institution claiming journalistic neutrality. Research by Aqalh and Abdul-Nabi (2026) demonstrates that the network’s coverage systematically “privileges Egyptian existential narratives whilst minimising Ethiopian developmental claims.” Abebe, Tilahun, and Belay (2024) reach a complementary conclusion, finding that Al Jazeera “foregrounds conflict frames at the expense of cooperative or technical frames” when reporting the Ethio-Egyptian dispute. Nigatu and Lidetie (2025) are yet more direct, arguing that “the discursive privileging of Egyptian claims reflects broader regional power dynamics rather than journalistic neutrality.”
Let us be plain about what this means. When Ethiopia constructs a dam on the Blue Nile, a sovereign infrastructure project on its own territory, financed by its own citizens through bond purchases, designed to lift tens of millions out of energy poverty, Al Jazeera frames this as aggression. When Egypt invokes the language of existential threat to describe a dam it has no legal authority to veto, Al Jazeera amplifies that framing with minimal interrogation. The asymmetry is not subtle, and it is not neutral. It is, to borrow a phrase the network itself would deploy without hesitation in other contexts, state-serving propaganda dressed in the clothing of public interest journalism.
This double standard becomes yet more conspicuous when Al Jazeera trains its editorial eye upon Ethiopian journalists and social media influencers allegedly paid to promote Israeli narratives without disclosure. The ethical failures in question are genuine. Undisclosed sponsored travel is a serious breach of journalistic integrity, and it warrants honest, vigorous accountability. But Al Jazeera’s framing of these individual cases does not stop at ethical critique. It extrapolates, implying a broader Ethiopian susceptibility to manipulation, a national gullibility, as though the misconduct of a handful of individuals reveals something essentially true and damning about Ethiopia as a political society. One struggles to recall Al Jazeera applying the same extrapolative logic to, say, British journalists compromised by government access, or American commentators embedded with Gulf state public relations operations. The standard, it seems, applies selectively, and the selection tells us a great deal.
The Geopolitics Beneath the Editorial Line
Al Jazeera’s coverage of Ethiopia cannot be understood without understanding Qatar. The network is not an independent editorial enterprise in the manner it presents itself; it is a state-funded broadcaster whose editorial orientations are inevitably shaped by Qatari foreign policy priorities. Qatar has significant strategic interests in the Horn of Africa. It has mediated, with mixed results and considerable self-interest, in various regional disputes. Its relationships with Egypt, with various Islamist political movements, and with competing Gulf powers all create a web of geopolitical incentives that bear directly upon how its flagship broadcaster chooses to cover a country like Ethiopia.
When Al Jazeera foregrounds Ethiopian instability, it is not simply making an editorial judgement about newsworthiness. It is whether consciously or through the more insidious mechanism of institutionalised editorial culture, producing a representation of Ethiopia that serves certain regional actors and their preferred narratives. A fractious, fragile, easily-manipulated Ethiopia is convenient for those who wish to portray the GERD as reckless rather than visionary, who wish to frame Ethiopian foreign policy as reactive rather than strategic, who wish, in short, to diminish Ethiopia’s standing in a region where it remains, despite everything, the most populous nation and the diplomatic anchor of the African Union.
This is media as geopolitical instrument. It deserves to be named as such.
The History That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Perhaps the most intellectually dishonest feature of Al Jazeera’s recent Ethiopia coverage is what it refuses to remember. Ethiopia is home to one of Africa’s largest refugee populations — not as a transit country, but as a host. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have found sanctuary on Ethiopian soil. Syrians who fled the catastrophic civil war that Al Jazeera covered with such sustained passion built lives in Addis Ababa, opened businesses, integrated into communities welcomed, for the most part, without the violent xenophobia that has disfigured the response of certain wealthier nations considerably better placed to absorb displacement. This is an extraordinary humanitarian record. Al Jazeera, so reliably attentive to refugee suffering when it serves a particular narrative, has shown remarkably little interest in it here.
More glaring still is the erasure of Ethiopia’s history with Palestine. Ethiopia was among the earliest African nations to extend formal support to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Yasir Arafat addressed African leaders at the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa; Ethiopia voted consistently in multilateral forums for Palestinian self-determination; Ethiopian diplomacy maintained active solidarity with Palestinian representatives at a time when such solidarity carried genuine political cost. This is not contested history. It is documented, verifiable, and, one might think, precisely the kind of historical context that a broadcaster claiming to champion the Palestinian cause would consider relevant when reporting on Ethiopian figures accused of normalisation.
The omission is not an oversight. Omissions of this magnitude are editorial choices, and editorial choices have politics. By stripping this history from its coverage, Al Jazeera constructs an Ethiopia that appears opportunistic, indifferent, or simply ignorant, when the historical record suggests something rather different. It is a fabrication by deletion, and it is no less dishonest for being achieved through silence rather than falsehood.
The Weaponisation of Ethical Critique
It would be foolish to dismiss the ethical questions surrounding undisclosed sponsored content. Ethiopian journalists, influencers, and public figures who accepted Israeli government-linked hospitality without transparency owe their audiences an explanation, and the institutions responsible for upholding professional standards in Ethiopian media must take this seriously. There is real work to be done here, and it must be done by Ethiopians critically, rigorously, and without defensiveness.
But Al Jazeera’s intervention in this conversation is not a contribution to that work. It is an exploitation of it. By transforming individual ethical failures into evidence of systemic national vulnerability, the network performs a rhetorical manoeuvre with which African countries are depressingly familiar: the individualisation of misconduct when the individual is sympathetic, and the nationalisation of misconduct when the nation is a useful target. The miscreant becomes the country; the country becomes the cautionary tale; and Al Jazeera, whose own editorial record includes systematic bias in its coverage of Qatar’s regional rivals, Egypt’s political upheavals, and the Syrian catastrophe, positions itself as moral arbiter.
This is audacity of a remarkable order. It ought to be said so, plainly and in public.
Reclaiming the Story
None of this analysis should be mistaken for an argument that Ethiopia’s image problems are entirely externally manufactured. There are genuine governance challenges, genuine humanitarian crises, genuine failures of accountability that Ethiopian citizens, including this columnist, have every right and obligation to scrutinise honestly. The integrity of Ethiopian public discourse depends upon exactly that kind of internal accountability. Narrative sovereignty is not a licence for self-flattery.
But there is a meaningful difference between honest internal critique and the systematic, geopolitically-motivated distortion of a country’s image by a foreign state broadcaster with its own interests to protect. Ethiopia is entitled to contest the latter even whilst engaging in the former. Indeed, the two are inseparable: a society confident enough in its own critical institutions is far better equipped to push back against external misrepresentation precisely because it has already done the harder work of honest self-examination.
What is required, practically, is investment in Ethiopian media institutions of genuine independence, in scholarly work that produces the kind of evidence-based counter-analysis demonstrated by researchers at Addis Ababa University and Jimma University, in diplomatic and cultural channels that carry Ethiopian perspectives into international conversations without waiting for the permission of hostile intermediaries. The work of Abebe, Tilahun, and Belay (2024), of Nigatu and Lidetie (2025), of Ayalew (2021) — this is exactly the kind of intellectual infrastructure upon which narrative sovereignty is built. It needs to be resourced, disseminated, and taken seriously by Ethiopian institutions at every level.
A Final Remark
Al Jazeera will, in all probability, continue to cover Ethiopia through the lens of crisis, conflict, and selective moral outrage. The incentives that produce such coverage have not changed. What can change is Ethiopia’s posture in relation to it , from passive subject to active interlocutor, from recipient of external narratives to producer of its own.
Ethiopia’s story, its complexity, its resilience, its genuinely extraordinary diplomatic and humanitarian record, is too important to be left to those with every reason to tell it badly.
It is time to tell it ourselves.
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References
Abebe, T., Tilahun, M. & Belay, S. (2024) Media Framing of the Ethio-Egyptian Dispute over the First Round Water Filling of GERD: ETV and Al Jazeera in Focus. Addis Ababa University Press.
Aqalh, A. & Abdul-Nabi, M. (2026) Framing of Ethiopia–Egypt Dam Conflict: A Comparative Analysis of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Emerald Publishing. DOI: 10.1108/978-1-80592-949-920261005.
Ayalew, M. (2021) Framing of the Ethio-Egypt Conflict on GERD’s Water Filling: ETV and Al-Jazeera in Focus. MA Thesis, Jimma University.
Nigatu, M. & Lidetie, A. (2025) ‘Sovereignty vs Survival: A Critical Discourse Analysis of BBC and Al-Jazeera’s Reporting on GERD Negotiations’, Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1). DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2025.2451486.
Ojola, D. (2025) Framing Analysis of BBC and Al Jazeera Coverage of the Ethiopia–Somaliland MoU. University of Helsinki.
