Along with reporting the news, though, Al Jazeera has also spent a good chunk of its 20-year history making it. The Saudis recalled their ambassador from Doha in 2002 after the network aired a panel discussion featuring dissidents from the kingdom. Other countries have periodically expelled Al Jazeera journalists and tried to block its satellite signal; Egypt arrested three staffers in 2013 on sham charges of reporting false news and terrorism, and held them in custody for more than a year. But the current crisis—the demand for its complete closure—is unprecedented.

Despite the headaches it caused, Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel (AJA) was a useful instrument of soft power for a tiny state that once tried to stand apart from both its neighbors and the region’s internecine feuds. Doha used to be a sort of Geneva-on-the-Gulf, the place where everyone went to hash out their differences. It wasn't uncommon to see camouflage-clad Sudanese rebels taking high tea in the lobby of the Four Seasons. Hamas and Fatah, the rival Palestinian factions, signed a reconciliation deal in Qatar. Lebanese leaders did the same in 2008, ending an 18-month standoff in Beirut.

At the start of the Arab Spring, both the emirate and the network shifted gears. They initially backed the uprisings, then narrowed their focus, throwing their support behind the Islamist groups that tried to fill the vacuum. It was a risky bet for Qatar, one that quickly backfired. Within two years, the Islamists had either provoked a backlash in Tunisia and Egypt or found themselves embroiled in ruinous civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

There was, and still is, a vast gulf between AJA and Al Jazeera English, which was launched in 2006. They share a name, but little else, even operating out of separate buildings across the street from each other. Their editorial lines are also sharply different. In February 2011, days after Mubarak resigned, citizens of Bahrain started their own anti-government protests, led by the country’s Shia majority, which has long suffered under an official policy of discrimination. Saudi Arabia soon sent troops to help quash the uprising, which Gulf leaders viewed—without any credible proof—as an Iranian plot to undermine a fellow monarch. AJA largely stuck to the official line. The English-language channel was far more critical, and even won a Peabody Award for a documentary on the brutal crackdown. I made several trips to Bahrain myself, and never felt any pressure to change my reporting.

The climate changed in the summer of 2013, after the Egyptian army overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the elected Muslim Brotherhood president. On August 14, as security forces were brutally clearing a pro-Morsi sit-in, an Al Jazeera English presenter asked a Brotherhood spokesperson a valid question: why were women and children still present at a protest that would inevitably be targeted by the authorities? The anchor was almost immediately pulled off the air and reprimanded for being insufficiently sympathetic to the group. For months, she was barred from presenting the news and relegated to a pre-recorded chat show. There was also an internal struggle over how to cover that summer’s protests against Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.