Power of the media

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Last week the New York Times published a series of articles in which the editors conceded that their support for the war on Iraq was a mistake. The American media, they said, had rushed into supporting the Bush administration and had worked to justify its reasons for going to war. This has since proven groundless, as Washington has not found a single shred of evidence indicating a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda or any trace of weapons of mass destruction.

This obvious failure is only reinforced by the fact that Saddam has not been charged with either collaboration with Al-Qaeda or harbouring WMD. The unprecedented admission is a bold step on the part of the American newspaper, and its condemnation of US Middle East policy is worthy of the utmost respect.

For its part the Arab media should concede the crime they have committed against the Iraqi people: the long silence vis-ˆ-vis the practices of the former Iraqi regime. The silence was a perpetual crime committed by the Arab media which tend to go out of their way to appease not only the regime under which they operate but every other Arab government as well.

The over-riding viewpoint in the Arab media is that an objective treatment of current issues will undermine inter- Arab relations. This absence of objectivity can only divest the media of its credibility and prevent it from contributing to the development of the region.

Since Guttenberg's printing press helped popularise Martin Luther's Christian reformation across Europe and beyond, the media have played a vital role in informing an increasingly inclusive public domain and contributing to freedom movements, revolutions and intellectual growth throughout the world. Gamal Abdel- Nasser's use of the radio as the principal means to sustain his popularity and communicate his nationalist ideas is perhaps the most obvious local example of the media's influence. Likewise Iran's Islamic revolutionaries made extensive and very effective use of cassette tapes. Chinese students in the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising used the fax machine to gain international support. Revolutionary movements in Poland and Romania benefited from video recordings and the Internet contributed to the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, among numerous other examples.

The power of the media cannot be overestimated. Yet Arab media have yet to understand the full importance of this fact. The media are conceived of as an innocuous arm of a regime that can only obstruct political progress.