Continuing today’s trend of journalism-related posts I decided to take a look at the top Islamic news sources in the world and what their impact is on their readers and the community around them. Given my earlier post about free-press in Islamic countries I was wondering how reliable the news sources in the Islamic world. My thoughts going into the research was that these sources are probably not very reliable and I was anticipating that most of them are probably state-owned publications. I found a very useful Lib-guide that lists Muslim news sources around the world. Here are a few examples that I could find:
- Al-Ahram is the most widely circulating Egyptian daily newspaper according to the Lib-guide. I found that it is owned by the Egyptian government’s “Supreme Council of Press”. essentially the state owns shares of the paper. They view the journalists as “appointees of the state” so I found that the publication is not censored by the government because of this understanding.
- Donya-e-Eqtesad is one of the most widely circulated papers in Iran and it focuses on economic news. I found that it doesn’t currently have an affiliation to the Iranian government and it is often offers moderate criticism to it.
The list is obviously not limited to these two examples but this was still an interesting exercise for me as a journalism major.