Al Jazeera Being Blackballed?

An unverified email came in today which I present in the hopes someone can track this down and get to the bottom of these claims…

From a friend working in al Jazeera’s newsgathering on the troubles in Egypt: “We’ve been refused by IHA, AP, VCSS, EBU, Overon”.

These are of course all big players (VCSS not necessarily included) offering satellite uplinks and various other broadcasting facilities.

Update: I have an inquiry in to Al Jazeera. I doubt I’ll get a response but it’s worth a try…

For the uninitiated IHA appears to me to be the Ihlas News Agency, AP is the Associated Press, VCSS is Video Cairo Support Services, EBU is apparently the European Broadcasting Union (though EBU could possibly refer to something else), and Overon is a satellite/production service company based in Spain.

Update 2: My source further reports that Al Jazeera is apparently just getting by on broadband. This all has to do with the Egypt order shutting the network down. Apparently a lot of brother organizations are afraid of getting on Egypt’s bad side. To further add weight to this theory is this tweet from Al Jazeera’s Adrian Finighan…

APTN has cancelled Al Jaz’s sat bookings to comply with Egyptian govt banning order. A principled stand by fellow journalists. Not.

APTN is the Associated Press Television News, one of the agencies cited in the original report. I have not heard anything about Reuters yet though…

Update 3: ABC reported that APTN had their satellite dishes in Cairo torn down by pro Mubarak protesters…