Has Al-Jazeera lost its journalistic independence?

That's the charge made by some prominent staffers who've recently quit their jobs at the Arab TV network. They claim Al-Jazeera is now beholden to a political agenda dictated by the man who bankrolls the operation, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the emir of Qatar.

Rumblings of such problems came to light last September, when Al-Jazeera's news director ordered staffers to lead their coverage of the United Nations debate on Syrian intervention with the emir's speech on the issue, instead of a more significant address from President Obama.

Staffers protested to no avail, the Guardian reports.

More recently, former staffers claim that Al-Jazeera has sided with the new rulers who've come to power in the Arab Spring - even when those leaders violate the principles that Al-Jazeera once championed.

In the past, Al-Jazeera made a habit of excoriating Mideast dictators like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, while providing sympathetic coverage of the dissidents who were imprisoned under such regimes.

But now that Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are in power in Egypt, the tables have turned. Former Al-Jazeera staffer Aktham Suliman, in an interview with German magazine Spiegel, says network execs want positive coverage of Morsi's decrees. And protesters who demonstrate against Morsi's strong-arm tactics are now the ones getting the cold shoulder from Al-Jazeera.

"Such a dictatorial approach would have been unthinkable before," Suliman tells Spiegel. "In Egypt we have become the palace broadcaster for Morsi."

Another former Al-Jazeera reporter who isn't named tells Spiegel that Al-Jazeera takes a position "not based on journalistic priorities, but rather on the interests of the Foreign Ministry of Qatar." He says that in order to maintain his journalistic integrity, "I had to quit."

Al-Jazeera officials did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on these claims.

Al-Jazeera was launched in 1996 with the goal of providing an independent journalistic voice in a region where censorship was de rigueur. It was branded a "terror network" by some in the U.S. when it broadcast messages from Osama bin Laden, but it also won praise for being the only Arab news outlet to regularly feature Israeli politicians in debates.

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually praised the network. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton said:

"Like it or hate it, it is really effective. In fact viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."

But as far back as 2010, a U.S. State Department memo released by WikiLeaks charged that the Qatar government was manipulating Al-Jazeera's coverage to suit the tiny country's political interests. Critics have also claimed that the network is anti-Semitic and anti-American.

Al-Jazeera today has more than 3,000 staffers and dozens of bureaus worldwide. Some 50 million households throughout the Arab world watch regularly. Al-Jazeera English was launched in 2006 and in January 2013 the network purchased the low-rated cable channel Current TV for $500 million in order to establish a beachhead in the U.S. and compete head-to-head with the likes of CNN.

Al-Jazeera isn't the only foreign news outlet trying to gain a foothold in the U.S. China's Xinhua News Agency - the propaganda arm of the Communist Party - is launching a 24-hour English-language news channel with a newsroom in Times Square.

But if such ventures are to gain acceptance on these shores, they will have to prove they aren't propaganda mouthpieces. With Xinhua News that's not likely; the Chinese government isn't likely to relinquish control any time soon. With the allegations swirling around Al-Jazeera, it remains to be seen whether the network's U.S. channel will be an independent news operation, or merely a tool of the emir.

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