Thursday, October 09, 2003

Arab media slowly catching up

Session on Western media and Iraq

PV Vivekanand

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

PV VIVEKANAND
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.