From Economist in 2005, February 25th : "Recently, the emirate announced it was preparing to privatise the channel. If it means it, and al-Jazeera is truly to be sold outright, its buyer will be pressed hard to make a deal with the Saudis. That would be a shame, because except for al-Jazeera, Saudi Arabia, through various proxies and deals, holds a virtual monopoly of the Arab satellite ether. In other words, Arabs may soon look back on the age of al-Jazeera as an all-too-brief flowering of critical, independent journalism."