Al Arabiya

Al Arabiya (Arabic: العربية‎, transliterated: al-ʿArabiyyah or al-ʻArabīyah; the name means: "The Arabic One" or "The Arab One") is a Saudi-owned pan-Arab television news channel broadcast in Modern Standard Arabic.

History and profile

Launched on 3 March 2003, The channel is based in Dubai Media City, United Arab Emirates, and is owned by Saudi broadcaster Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC).

The former general manager of Al Arabiya is Abdulrahman Al Rashed. He was replaced in the post by Adel Al Toraifi on 22 November 2014.

A free-to-air channel, Al Arabiya carries news, current affairs, business and financial markets, sports, talk shows, and documentaries. It is rated by the BBC among the top pan-Arab stations by Middle East audiences. The channel has been criticized for having a "pro-Saudi agenda", and it was once banned in Iraq by the US-installed Governing Council for "incitement to murder" for broadcasting audio tapes of Saddam Hussein.

On 26 January 2009, American president Barack Obama gave his first formal interview as president to the television channel.

Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera (Arabic: الجزيرة‎ al-ǧazīrah IPA: [æl dʒæˈziːrɐ], literally "The Peninsula", referring to the Arabian Peninsula), also known as JSC (Jazeera Satellite Channel), is a Doha-based state-funded broadcaster owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network, which is partly funded by the House of Thani, the ruling family of Qatar. Initially launched as an Arabic news and current affairs satellite TV channel, Al Jazeera has since expanded into a network with several outlets, including the Internet and specialty TV channels in multiple languages.

Al Jazeera is among the largest news organizations with 80 bureaus around the world. Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. While Al Jazeera officials have stated that they are editorially independent from the government of Qatar, this assertion has been disputed.

The original Al Jazeera channel's willingness to broadcast dissenting views, for example on call-in shows, created controversies in the Arab States of the Persian Gulf. The station gained worldwide attention following the outbreak of war in Afghanistan, when it was the only channel to cover the war live, from its office there.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia (ⁱ/ˌsɔːdiː əˈreɪbiə/, ⁱ/ˌsaʊ-/), officially known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is an Arab state in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km² (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the second-largest state in the Arab world after Algeria. Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north, Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast, and Yemen to the south. It is the only nation with both a Red Sea coast and a Persian Gulf coast, and most of its terrain consists of arid inhospitable desert or barren landforms.

The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd, and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia ('Asir). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud. He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud. The country has since been an absolute monarchy, effectively a hereditary dictatorship governed along Islamic lines. The ultra-conservative Wahhabism religious movement within Sunni Islam has been called "the predominant feature of Saudi culture", with its global spreading largely financed by the oil and gas trade. Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "the Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca), and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in Islam. The Kingdom has a total population of 28.7 million, of which 20 million are Saudi nationals and 8 million are foreigners.

Al Jazeera English

Al Jazeera English (AJE) is an international state-funded 24-hour English-language news and current affairs TV channel owned and operated by Al Jazeera Media Network, which is headquartered in Doha, Qatar.

It is a sister channel of the U.S.-based English-language channel Al Jazeera America (AJAM), the Bosnia and Herzegovina-based multi-language Al Jazeera Balkans, and the original, Arabic-language, Al Jazeera (sometimes referred to as Al Jazeera Arabic). The station broadcasts news features and analysis, documentaries, live debates, current affairs, business, technology, and sports, and claims to be the first global high-definition television network. Al Jazeera English is the world's first English-language news channel to be headquartered in the Middle East. The channel aims to provide both a regional voice and a global perspective for a potential world audience of over one billion English speakers who do not share the Anglo-American worldview.

Instead of being run under one central command, news management rotates between broadcasting centers in Doha and London. At its launch, the station actually had four news centres in the world, in: Washington, D.C., London, Doha, and Kuala Lumpur. Complete news bulletins from Kuala Lumpur stopped on 30 September 2010 and from Washington DC on 28 January 2011; they were replaced by news from Doha. All news inserts from Kuala Lumpur ceased in early 2011 and from Washington DC they ceased on 15 April 2012. By contrast, Al Jazeera English is one of the few global media outlets to maintain an agency in Gaza, and in Harare.

FM broadcasting

FM broadcasting is a VHF broadcasting technology, pioneered by Edwin Howard Armstrong, which uses frequency modulation (FM) to provide high-fidelity sound over broadcast radio. The term "FM band" describes the frequency band in a given country which is dedicated to FM broadcasting. This term is slightly misleading, as it equates a modulation method within a range of frequencies.

Broadcast bands

Throughout the world, the FM broadcast band falls within the VHF part of the radio spectrum. Usually 87.5 to 108.0 MHz is used, or some portion thereof, with few exceptions:

The frequency of an FM broadcast station (more strictly its assigned nominal center frequency) is usually an exact multiple of 100 kHz. In most of South Korea, the Americas, the Philippines and the Caribbean, only odd multiples are used. In some parts of Europe, Greenland and Africa, only even multiples are used. In the UK odd or even are used. In Italy, multiples of 50 kHz are used. There are other unusual and obsolete standards in some countries, including 0.001, 0.01, 0.03, 0.074, 0.5, and 0.3 MHz. However, to minimise cross-channel interference, stations operating from the same or geographically close transmitters tend to keep to at least a 0.5 MHz frequency separation even when closer spacing is technically permitted, with closer tunings reserved for more distantly spaced transmitters as potentially interfering signals are already more attenuated and so have less effect on neighbouring frequencies. RCA stereo models use multiples of 0.2 MHz, starting at 87.50 and ending at 107.90.