20 Years of Al Jazeera English: The Counter Narrative

Featured Documentaries

Two decades of AJE: Shaping media, amplifying unheard voices and driving global conversations.

In November 2006, Al Jazeera English went live with an audacious mandate: to challenge the traditional hegemony of Western media conglomerates and structurally invert the global news flow by providing a localised, uncompromising perspective from the Global South to the English-speaking world. To mark its 20th anniversary, this documentary delivers a definitive, multilayered chronicle of AJE’s trajectory from a disruptive alternative to dominant Western news media to the globally consumed news source it is today. The film seamlessly pairs an outside-in investigative lens with ground-up human testimony and internal insights. The film reflects on AJE’s historic coverage of global conflicts, the climate crisis, genocide and more in a drastically changing media landscape, all while balancing difficult decisions regarding where to focus resources, battling stigma as state-funded media and weathering the targeting of the channel’s journalists and bureaus while trying to remain true to AJE’s core principles.

Published On 15 Nov 2026