From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

When WikiLeaks released 200,000-some U.S. diplomatic cables, one journalist's name was mentioned more than 400 times. He is Wada Kanfar, news director of the

Qatar-based satellite news channel, Al Jazeera. Many of the mentions involved diplomatic

complaints about Al Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq War and the Middle East in general, which

coverage the U.S. government has often regarded

as populistic to the point of inflammatory. Here's how Wada Kanfar explained Al Jazeera's perspective

to us last year. The amount of commitment that our audience have towards Al Jazeera,

they embrace us, not because we are politically correct from the point of view of governments,

which most of them are authoritarian.

No, we are full of pride and determination because the public think of Al Jazeera as their own.

But the WikiLeaks revelation this week was of a very different sort,

antagonizing not the United States government but Qatar's,

and Confar is no longer running Al Jazeera.

The reason, possibly the emergence of one particular WikiLeak,

a 2005 cable from U.S. ambassador to Qatar, Chase Untermeyer,

suggesting that Kahnfar had softened coverage of the Iraq invasion under pressure from the United States and Qatar,

whose royal family funds Al Jazeera.

Kanfar has been replaced by Sheikh Ahmad bin Yassim bin Muhammad Al-Al Muhammad Altani, a member of the Qatari royal family.

Lawrence Pintak is a longtime Middle East correspondent and author of the new Arab journalist, mission and identity in a time of turmoil.

Lawrence, welcome back to On the Media.

...