Arab media slowly catching up

Session on Western media and Iraq

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The Arab media showed that it is moving towards holding its ground against the continuing assault by the Western media during the recent war on Iraq and were more objective in its coverage of the conflict when compared to the Western media.
However, the Arab media have to go a long way ahead before it could actually do the job they are supposed to do in terms of being instrumental in changes in the society.
This was the consensus at discussions held here on Wednesday as part of Arab Media Summit 2003, which ended later in the day.
The session, held under the title "Iraq as a case study: Western media coverage," was moderated by Peter Arnett, a former CNN correspondent who gained prominence during the 1991 Gulf war by virtue of him being the only American television reporter in who remained in Iraq throughout the military conflict.
According to Arnett, there need not be much of a classification between the Western and Arab television channels since news organisations borrowed each other's footage.
He referred to the arrangement between CNN and Al Jazeera television during the Afghanistan whereby the American network heavily used Al Jazeera footage.
In a broader context, Arnett described the recent war against Iraq as a continuation of the 1991 Gulf war, and said it "did not have to take place."
"This is a 13-year war. It was a pre-emptive war. The US and UK did not have to launch it," he said. "In the case of World War II, there was no choice as it was a war of survival. But this war angered the Arab World as it did not have to take place," said Arnett.
He said it was a question of credibility and trust.
He recalled British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Iraq could launch its alleged weapons of mass destruction ((WMD) with a 45-minute notice and US Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out a full dossier against Iraq at the UN.
"The Iraqi side said we not have any WMD, you can search anywhere and that's what the UN did," he said. "But then, Saddam Hussein did not have any credibility," he said.
Arnett was employed by the American networks NBC and National Geographic for covering the recent Iraq war. But they fired him for saying on Iraqi TV that the US war plan had failed.
In his comments here on Wednesday, he criticised the decision to sack him.
"As journalists, we need to know the other side, we should know the other side," he said.
Arnett said CNN had brought back war reporting to the forefront. "War reporting was on a decline. CNN's success during the first war motivated others," he said. "
However, he argued that while the US had won the war on the military front, it has lost the "information war."
"Today, it is impossible for anyone to control the media. There is no embedding anymore," he said referring to the unprecedented way that American journalists were allowed to accompany military units which invaded Iraq.
Jihad Al Khazen, director and writer of the Al Hayat newspaper, said the Arab media had outdone the Western media in objectively covering war.
Clive Myrie, a BBC correspondent, said the issue should not be reduced to a beauty contest between the Arab and Western media.
"We are all involved in getting to the truth and that is what we should be doing," he said.
Arguing against certain Arab perceptions that the Western media is biased against the Arabs, he said the Western media is not a single monolith that thinks alike but consists of various perspectives and processes.
Myrie, who was one of the "embedded" journalists with the US Marines during the Iraq war, said he was viewing the war from the perspective of the men in the US army unit.
He said he had formed bonds with soldiers in the units and the impact this had on maintaining standards of objective journalism.
"They were feeding me and helping me in my task and gave me a front row seat to see the war but I still had the freedom to be objective in reporting the war," he said.
Arnett said that the concept of embedded journalists was a brilliant masterstroke of the Pentagon in trying to turn coverage of the war in their favour. The coverage of embedded journalists, he noted was perceived as highly reliable.
Janine Digiovanni, a correspondent of The Times, highlighted the need for journalists to work in underreported regions of the world like Chechnya.
She said there were several regions of the world that deserved to be covered because of the appalling abuse of human rights but were not covered because they did not have oil or pipelines or vast natural resources.
"More often than not these stories were in Africa where the level of violence and massacre is beyond horrific."
She talked about how she was one on the only three journalists to witness the fall of Grozny in Chechnya.
She also related how she was horrified by the level of damage created by Israeli tanks which levelled the West Bank town of Jenin in April 2002.
She said she was proud to see what the British press had written about what happened in the town.
However, she was less than proud of her American colleagues, whom she accused of burying the Jenin story, or brushed it off because it was not considered a massacre.

Arabic talk shows - Hard Talk

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ARAB television talk shows that were a magnet for Arabs when they were launched a few years ago have now turned into boring shouting matches that lack objectivity or focus, with the audience prompted to switch to other channels, participants in a round-table debate here agreed on Wednesday.
The need of the day to improve the shows is to bring in more professionalism in terms of research and background material in order to enlighten the audience and link them to the issue being discussed, they said.
Equally important is a sense of purpose for talk shows rather than a goal of "bashing" people, said Tim Sebastian, who hosts the celebrated "Hard Talk" show of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The general consensus at the one-hour discussion —"Western and Arabic TV Talk shows: Differences and Similarities — on the sidelines of Arab Media Summit 2003 was that Arab satellite channels like Al Jazeera started off with an impact and offering a forum for Arabs to express their opinion and highlight Arab causes and viewpoints. The channels assumed more prominence with their coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, but the talk shows declined in quality and content, according to the participants, most of whom were highly critical of Al Jazeera in particular.
The main complaint that was heard was that Arab television talk shows tend to be have less substance and are more oriented towards pleasing the audience through highly-charged debate.
At the same time, it was also observed that Arab television talks shows have not yet reached a level where they could be compared to the mature productions of the West as yet.
It was also debated whether Arabs interviewed on Western programmes like "hard talk" had sufficient mastery of English or suffered from lack of ability to be articulate self.
Commenting on complaints that many Arab figures participating in talk shows and interviews on Western television tend to leave wrong ideas and impression, Khaled Al Maeena, editor-in-chief of Arab News, made an emphatic point that those who do not think they qualify to take part should stay away from such shows because they end up giving wrong impressions and ideas. This is particularly applicable for senior government officials, he said.
Any personality who accepts an invitation to a talk show or interview should do his or homework and should prepare self to answer questions with authority, he said.
"Anyone who respects himself and is not qualified to speak on tv, should not go on air — whatever tv that is," said Maeena.
Also discussed was self-censorship by hosts — something that Sebastian said he never exercised in his 27 years with the BBC — and the need for television channels to ensure that their staff are not persecuted as a result of criticism on air.
According to Sebastian, "politics is a performing art" and "part of the interviewee's job is communication."
It is very important that every talk show should produce "new ideas.... new information" and this what makes successful talk shows, he said.
Western talk shows like his programme, he said, are not public relations exercises or entertainment. It is part of the democratic process where politicians and government leaders are held accountable in public.
He said research into the issues to be raised during the show or interview is an integral part of the professional approach; so is an post-event analysis of what it produced.
"Nobody gives anything to a journalist as a right. He has to go out and get it," he said.
"Rights evolve because people keep pushing for their freedom and what they want. One of the ways is through the TV," he said.
Sebastian said that he felt there is more openness from Middle Eastern governments, but there is also more self-censorship in the media.
"You have to keep pushing the boundaries. We have a right to hold our leadership to account because they affect our lives. It doesn't matter if you ruffle a few ministerial feathers, these are issues of life and death for many people," he said.
"For the purpose of the interviews, I take the opposing point of view because it is not very interesting to sit opposite and agree," he said.

Points of media convergence

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THE ARAB and Western media should focus on points of convergence rather than divergence and should accept that the fundamental principles guiding their work are the same, a prominent Arab writer and commentator said on Tuesday.
Khaled Al Maeena, editor-in-chief of Arab News, was addressing the first working session of the Arab Media Summit in Dubai.
In his short but comprehensive comment, Maeena told the session held under the title "Complicity? Responsibility? Liability? The Role of Media in the Modern War," Maeena tackled the various problems faced by the Arab media in addressing domestic Arab and international audiences.
He highlighted that the Arab media were fighting the stereotypes imposed on them.
"There's nothing called the Western media but only entities like the US media, European media and the British press," he said, adding that the US and British media had "distinguished themselves" from "Western media."
In the broader context, "while we do have some suspicion about each other, we can focus on areas of convergence," he said.
Maeena submitted that a new face of journalism was put forward during the Iraq war early this year. with the so-called embedded reporters donning uniforms and blatantly taking sides.
He called it compliance as well as complicity.
"Let me tell you, I'm not in the blame game," he said. "But at the same time it's a fact that a great chunk of the US media complied with the powers that be during the Iraq war.
"We know that there are people in the US who are with us. But the media have helped develop a situation in which Muslims and Islam are looked down upon as sub-human. The US media has helped create a fear psychosis," Maeena told the session, which was moderated by CNN's Nic Robertson.
Earlier in the session, Tim Sebastian of BBC's "Hard Talk" underlined the importance of having an media that asks for accountability and questions everyone concerns.
While expressing reservations over targeting the West for all the criticism, he said the Arab world needed do an introspection on how open they are to the outside world.
"What's your definition of truth? The truth that will help you keep your job or the truth that will get you fired?" Sebastian asked pointing out to a UN report which says not a single Arab country has freedom of press. "A free press is also a fallible press. But I prefer it to the alternative," he said.
The veteran BBC journalist denounced what he said was the practice of using war reporting as a yard stick of patriotism. The media should not take anything dished out to them by the officials at face value, he said.
"A questioning media is a key ingredient of any modern democracy," he said. "Nobody should be sent out to war without a reason. When the press asks 'why?' it deserves an answer from the powers that be," he said.
Robert Menard, chief executive officer of the France-based Journalists Sans Frontiers, voiced regret that governments which care little for press freedom expects the press to tell them the truth whatever be the risks involved.
"Even governments, which imprison and harass reporters for trying to find the truth never fail to lecture on press freedom. Truth is more and more becoming a casualty in conflicts," said Menard.
He noted that nearly 50 journalists were either killed or wounded in the three-year-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
"How can we be giving lessons to journalists without taking into account their safety?" asked Menard.
Hamdi Qandeel, a prominent television personality from Egypt, asserted that the situation in the Arab world has not changed much from the 1960s when military used to be the only permissible source of information for the press.
The situation is changing fast, he said and pointed out to the way
Qatar's Al Jazeera television and Abu Dhabi TV covered the Iraq and the quality of their reports.
Such a qualitative shift is a promise to everyone that there is hope for the Arab media to expand and improve itself so as to convey the Arab point of view to the audience.
The second interactive session of the day held under the title
"Media: The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction" and was moderated by Gavin Esler of the BBC.
Dr Azmi Bishara, Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, asserted that what he called politics of identity was a major hindrance to the Arabs to bring their real issues to the international community.
"The Arab media is always concerned with the politics of identity. It is always about 'we' and 'them,' either the Arabs versus the West or the Arabs versus Israel," said Bishara. "This disguises the more important issues concerning the oppressed people in the region, for example, the oppressed in Iraq," said Bishara, who represents Nazreth in the Knesset.
He criticised a large section of the Arab media for accepting the American media's versions in the name of rationality and pragmatism. However, the Arab media pose much less of a danger in spreading misinformation than the Western media because of the former's lack of credibility, he said.
Danny Schechter, a prominent writer from Washington, said it was wrong to label all American journalists anti-Arab. He pointed out that many American journalists were aware of the imbalances and were fighting disinformation and deception in the American media that were particularly highlighted during the coverage of the Iraq war.
At the same time, he conceded that many American journalists consider it as patriotism to accept the administration's point of view and be guided by it without question.
According to Schechter, the American media failed to show a great deal about the Iraq war to the American public. Such failure was deliberate, he said, since the media purposely held back information from the public. "The media can be judged more by its omissions," Schechter said.
Paul-Marie De La Gorce, a French journalist, slammed the US administration for having orchestrated what he said was a campaign of lies and deception in order to build the case for war against Iraq.
Specifically referring to the US allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, he noted that no such weapon has been found in post-war Iraq.
Mohammed Al Sayed Saeed of Egypt's Al Ahram newspaper also referred to the American media build-up for war.
"Countries do not go to war because of interests but due to images," he said. "Media bombard minds with images that fill it with ideas and penetrate minds."
On Tuesday, three interaction sessions are the highlights of the Arab Media Summit, which will culminate with the presentation of the Arab Journalism Awards.
Among those attending the interactive sessions are Peter Arnett, a former CNN correspondent, Jihad Al Khazen of Al Hayat and former Palestinian minister Dr Hanan Ashrawi.

Wake-up calls at Arab Media Summit

October
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STRONG calls were heard in Dubai on Tuesday for retrospection by the Arab information media and a fresh strategy and perspective aimed at raising medial professionalism in the Arab World.
Leading the call was UAE Minister of Information Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who, in a harsh-hitting key note address at the opening of Arab Media Summit 2003, criticised the Arab media of having failed to expose the realities of the Gulf crisis and not presenting the actual picture of the military situation before the recent war on Iraq.
Sheikh Abdullah and others speakers at the forum, which was opened by ubai Crown Prince and UAE Defence Minister General Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum in the presence of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, emphasised the need for a sweeping rethink on the part of the Arab media with a view to effectively presenting the Arab viewpoint effectively to the international community.
The forum -- held under the tile "War & the Media" — also heard calls for a new perspective on the concept of press freedom with responsibility and admissions by Western journalists that objectivity and accuracy were often lacking in the non-Arab media too.
Sheikh Mohammed told the gathering, the third of its kind, that the interaction between Arab and non-Arab media personalities also brought to the fore the prevailing sense of distrust as well as allegations of one-sided and 'selective' approach to truth in journalism.
Sheikh Mohammed lamented that the Arab countries have become the exporters of bad news over a long period now.
New disputes are springing up and the dispute over water is predicted to take the centrestage of Arab politics in the future, he reminded.
"Can we , if not an Arab nation, at least form a limited liability company with human beings as its capital," Sheikh Mohammed asked, concluding his speech with a strong condemnation of the Israeli aggression on Syria.
Schroeder in his speech sought the help of the media in reducing the hostile preconceptions between people in the Arab World as well as in the West. "The European Union is looking towards building meaningful relationship with the GCC countries. The Arab media can greatly contribute in this regard as it is in the threshold of an information revolution facilitated by excellent infrastructure," he remarked.
Schroeder said that while freedom is undoubtedly a precondition for prosperity, the media should make responsible use of this freedom.
In what was hailed as the some of the most refreshing comment heard from an Arab minister of information, Sheikh Abdullah regreted that the recent war on Iraq once again exposed the failure of the Arab media in distinguishing between fact and propaganda.
"Before the war, Arab media failed to reveal the true nature of the Iraqi regime...but dealt with it as if it were a peaceful government and portrayed the conflict as simply one between Western powers and an Arab regime ready to confront and challenge them in the name of Arab honour and sovereignty," he told the gathering.
"Arab media distanced itself from reality and helped mislead public opinion by supplying unrealistic suppositions about the possible outcome of the conflict," Sheikh Abdullah said.
Sheikh Abdullah said that if the region's media had adopted an objective approach and exposed the real situation where that the military balance was tilted in favour of coalition forces, there would not have been such "panic and frustration" in the Middle East.
"Arab media must take an objective stand and not allow anything to prevent us from self-criticism and evaluation to achieve a media which informs, not misleads, which explains, not distorts," he said. "We must accept that there are mistakes and weaknesses in our governments and societies..." The opening session was followed by two interactive sessions, one on "Complicity? Responsibility? Liability? The Role of Media in the Modern War" and the second on "Media: The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction.'
Addressing the first of these interactive sessions, were Tim Sebastian of BBC's "Hard Talk," who denounced the practice of using war reporting as a yard stick of patriotism. The media should not take anything dished out to them by the officials at face value. A questioning media is a key ingredient of any modern democracy. Nobody should be sent out to war without a reason, he said.ed.
Robert Menard, chief executive officer of the France-based Journalists Sans Frontiers, regretted that even governments who care little for press freedom expects the press to tell them the truth whatever be the risks involved.
Hamdi Qandeel, a television presenter from Egypt, lamented that the situation in the Arab world has not changed much from the 1960s when military used to be the only permissible source of information for the press. However, coverage by Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV during the recent war in Iraq held out a promise for those who strive to put across the Arab point of view to the public, he added.
Khalid Al Maena, editor-in-chief of Arab News, in his brief but comprehensive speech summarised the conflicts and dilemmas faced by the Arab media in taking the message to the rest of the world and in fighting the stereotypes imposed on it. "There's nothing called the Western media but only entities like the US media, European media and the British press. While we do have some suspicion about each other, we can focus on areas of convergence," he suggested.
Nic Robertson of CNN was the moderator at the session while the second interactive session was moderated by Gavin Esler of BBC. Speakers at the second session included Dr Azmi Bishara, Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, Danny Schechter, writer from Washington, Paul-Marie De La Gorce, correspondent from France and Dr Mohammed Al Sayed Saeed of Egypt's Al Ahram newspaper.
Bishara said that the stress on politics of identity was not helping Arabs to project the real issues to the rest of the world. "The Arab media is always concerned with the politics of identity. It is always about 'we' and 'them,' either the Arabs versus the West or the Arabs versus Israel. This disguises the more important issues concerning the oppressed people in the region, for example, the oppressed in Iraq," Bishara said.
Schechter expressed his opposition to grouping together all American journalists as anti-Arab, citing that many of them have been putting up a fight against the wave of misnformation and deception in the US press, as was seen during the recent Iraq war. He, however, admitted that many US journalists almost consider it their "patriotic duty" to accept the establishment's point of view.
De La Gorce termed America's campaign against Iraq on the issue of weapons of mass destruction as one of lies and deception. Sayed Saeed, referring to the American campaign said that countries do not go to war because of interests but due to images.
The summit concludes on Wednesday with the Arab Media Awards ceremony.