9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Weapons and truth
Tarek Atia wonders where all the discussions of media bias on both sides of the Arab-West divide are heading
At last week's Dubai Media Summit, as in the hundreds of articles written on the subject in the Arab press since September 11, there seems to be a lack of willingness to get into the gritty details of how the image of the Arab world in the Western press might be improved.
For instance, critics are quick to say we need a pan-Arab media operation that addresses the West in its own language, but are hard-pressed to think seriously about how such an operation would be funded, and how that funding might be removed from any particular nation's identity.
When I took my concerns to Youssef Al- Hassan, an Emirati diplomat and writer who spoke extensively in Dubai on this subject, he argued that those kinds of details can not be discussed in a large-scale conference such as this one. "The money is there," Al-Hassan told me, "but you have to approach investors with a proper project, and an agenda." Those kind of details, he said, require workshops, and small groups, to come up with the right mechanisms. He hoped that -- after conferences like this discussed the bigger picture -- the next step would not be far behind.
His optimism was admirable, but much of the action at the conference seemed to reveal a different story.
Many of the Western speakers -- whether of Arab origin or in the "Arab friends" category -- seemed to be advertising themselves as the best candidates to run PR campaigns in the West to help improve the Arab image. While much of what they said about Arabs and Arab countries not understanding the mechanisms of influencing the West made sense, their self- promotion seemed to distract from the truth of the situation.
But perhaps the most disturbing phenomenon which became quite obvious by the end of the two-day event was that the Arab world had still not even come to a clear definition of what it wanted its media to be.
Al-Hayat columnist Jihad El-Khazen and others argued that media's role is not PR, but truth telling. Daily Star publisher Jamil Mroue also said quite bluntly that media was not a weapon.
These sentiments were either only meant for the audience's consumption, or else revealed just how far behind Arab media really was.
For journalism may have been, in its original form (and even this is debatable), a totally independent check on society's and government's ills, but these days it was obvious that many Western entities were in fact using it as a weapon.
You didn't have to look much further than prominent US columnists joking about nuking Mecca to teach Muslims a lesson, as Rich Lowry recently did in the National Review, for examples of this style of journalism.
And it's a weapon that has clearly found its target and is beginning to wreak its damage in not so obvious ways.
In the week or so since I've been back from the Dubai summit I have been even more receptive to just how prevalent the subject of media bias against the Arab world has become in our discourse. Just today, a woman asked me to speak to her daughter, who had come across a Web site which contained offensive comments about both Palestine and Islam. This Web site claimed -- in very convincing terms -- that "Palestine" did not really exist, and featured unattractive commentary about Prophet Mohamed's wives. Having never seen anything like this before, the young woman was shocked -- and wanted to know how she might fight back. Her mother also said she wanted to do something, but didn't know where to begin.
Is the answer to the US's rabid anti-Muslim and Arab far right media an equally rabid Arab anti-American media -- even if that was the course to take, it seemed clear that the young woman and her mother did not possess the proper tools or weapons to fight back this attack.
I told her the language barrier was one important thing to consider. But we all speak English, she said. Yes, I countered, but not in a way that would allow you to convincingly respond to an argument like this.
In the end I advised the young woman to search out other Web sites or articles that gave a truer picture of the issues, and then, whenever she found a Web site that distorted things, to look for the site's comments area, and calmly write that if anyone reading this Web site wanted to get an alternative view on the subject, then they should visit such and such dot com. "Emotional responses," I said, "tend not to work."
Unfortunately, however, even at the upper echelons of the debate, amongst the bevy of prominent figures at the Dubai summit, emotion seemed to be the order of the day.
Many of the speakers -- top Arabic columnists and editors -- chose to go for the simple, nationalistic, crowd-pleasing, applause-generating approach in their discussions, repeating the same clichés about evil America, without really offering significant ideas towards solving the Arab world's image problem.
In fact, it was very interesting to watch the way Western speakers, for the most part, took notes during the discussion session after their speeches, and tried to answer the questions and points brought up by the audience, while the Arabic speakers were content to just say "Shokran" and move on to the next speaker, as if the audience's comments were not even important enough to address.
Have these Arabic columnists -- once they've been lofted onto their soap boxes -- become just as anti-democratic as the leaders they always criticise in their columns?
Meanwhile, top Western journalists like New York Times's Thomas Friedman and Washington Post's Ben Bradlee were clearly there just to give their speech and leave, rather than engage in a real dialogue and respond to the criticism directed towards their publications.
Actually, many of the speakers argued that the Western picture of the Arab world is accurate. Whether or not that was true may become a moot point when one considers one of the important issues that the conference did not even come near to discussing -- the fact that the Western media was now also inundating the Arab world with its own potentially biased coverage actually translated into Arabic. The rapid appearance, in the last year or so, of Arabic versions of MSNBC, Newsweek, and CNN, means that Arabs are now reading about their own affairs in their own language, albeit through the editorial prism of the West.
The subtle effects of that wave may yet appear, but combined with the more overt PR- style efforts of things like the US government's new Sawa radio station, which recently debuted in the Middle East with the stated intention of influencing the region's young to be more tolerant, the issues being discussed at summits like Dubai's were certainly relevant, to say the least.
It's just that while the other side was moving full speed ahead, the Arab world was still deciding which train to catch.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page