This week, Media Talk comes from the al-Jazeera forum in Doha, the annual media and political conference organised by the Arab TV network, which flies in participants and delegates from all around the region to take part. In the light of the well-documented involvement of social media in the recent uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa, the organisers rearranged the conference line-up, inviting bloggers and online activists who have been involved in the various revolts.
It was a fascinating few days. For this edition of Media Talk, a Tunisian anti-censorship activist discusses how he "did what Tunisian journalists couldn't do", taking photographs of protesters shot by police in the uprisings there. Also in the podcast: Wael Khalili, a prominent pro-democracy campaigner in Egypt who is very active on Twitter; Nasser Weddady, a Mauritanian who has been active in highlighting and redistributing information from the north African uprisings; and Hisham Almiraat, an activist from Morocco.
One notable development of the past few months has been the rise in stature of al-Jazeera English. Despite its difficulty in getting carriage deals in the US, it's reportedly been watched in the White House, and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, last week described its content as "real news". I get a tour of their Doha setup – not dissimilar to the industrial-estate sheds occupied by Sky News in south-west London – and hear from their managing director, Al Anstey. I also hear from Wadhar Khanfar, the director general of Al-Jazeera, who is an enthusiastic proponent of the link between social media and mainstream broadcasters. (I also met the al-Jazeera cat, Maurice.)
Finally, Guardian commentator Seumas Milne puts the event into a wider context.
I should point out that while podcast producer Francesca Panetta and I travelled to Doha courtesy of al-Jazeera, all the editorial choices were ours.
