Longtime executive Al Anstey will succeed Ehab Al Shihabi as the new chief executive of Al Jazeera’s American news channel, Al Jazeera America.
Ehab Al Shihabi, who was responsible for launching the U.S. channel in 2013, was serving as interim CEO. In recent months, Al Shihabi has been taking on a greater role in the day-to-day oversight of the news operations.
Al Shihabi said he would continue at Al Jazeera America in the capacity of chief operating officer, according to an e-mail to staff on Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for Qatar-backed Al Jazeera America declined to comment on Al Shihabi’s status, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Anstey has been with Al Jazeera since 2005 and has served as managing director of Al Jazeera English, the company’s international English-language channel, since 2010, the newspaper reported.
“I’m delighted to be leading Al Jazeera America into the next stage of its development. The U.S. is a remarkable country, with amazing people across the nation who are looking for in-depth, trusted, and inspiring stories,” Anstey said told the Wall Street Journal.
Al Jazeera America is nearing the two-year anniversary of its launch amid controversy.
Last week, a former network employee filed a lawsuit charging that a senior executive was hostile to women and made anti-Israel remarks.
On Monday, Marcy McGinnis, one of the network’s senior journalists, abruptly resigned from the channel shortly after accepting a job change that would have taken her out of the newsroom, the Wall Street Journal reported.
McGinnis said she didn’t have a big fight with Al Shihabi but rather that “it was me watching how people were being treated and how the systems we were being forced under were just wrong,” she told the newspaper during an interview on Wednesday.
Also, heads of human resources and corporate communications resigned last week, and other high-profile hires were in the process of negotiating exits from the company, people close to the network told the Wall Street Journal.
And while the network has received strong critical praise for its journalism, its ratings are shrinking – despite staff cutbacks and shifts in program strategy in attempts to save money.
While the channel is available in about 60 million homes, in April it averaged 25,000 viewers in prime time, a 34 percent decline from January, according to Nielsen.
Al Jazeera America failed to secure broad distribution in the U.S.—in part, according to people familiar with the matter, due to distributors’ concerns about its Arabic-language sister channel’s reputation for having an anti-American slant in the past, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Instead, the Wall Street Journal reported, Al Jazeera bought Al Gore’s struggling channel Current TV in 2013 for nearly $500 million and announced plans to build a new American network.
In addition to the personnel departures, Matthew Luke, a former supervisor of media and archive management, filed a lawsuit in New York alleging that Al Jazeera America and Osman Mahmud, the network’s senior vice president of broadcast operations and technology, had him fired after he complained about Mr. Mahmud’s conduct.
“Mr. Mahmud’s discriminatory conduct included but was not limited to, removing female employees from projects to which they had been previously assigned by other management level employees, excluding women from emails and meetings relevant to their assignments and making discriminatory, anti-Semitic and anti-American remarks,” the lawsuit said.
The suit describes a dispute between McGinnis and Mahmud over the network’s use of an Israeli cameraman. Mahmud, the suit said, wanted the cameraman replaced with a Palestinian cameraman. McGinnis—who isn’t identified in the suit but was by Al Jazeera officials—complained to human resources about Mahmud.
Mahmud did not response to a request for comment, the Wall Street reported.
