Middle East 'Media Wars'

by Peter Ryan

The U.S. Sponsored Arabic news and entertainment channel "Al Hura," supposedly meant to spur democracy and free speech in the region, has faced a great deal of criticism, both from commentators in the United States and in the Middle East. GA Ahad, from the Guardian, describes it as a "cheesy, US-sponsored channel" that has "a messianic mission to change the views of Arabs and Muslims around the world towards the west and America by showing football games, explaining the acetic dimensions of baseball and airing documentaries about the 'fence' in Palestine, along with doses of fashion... Give me a break - the tons of conspiracy theories and bitterness that have been building on our heads cannot be erased by fashion and football."

Daoud Kuttab , a Palestinian journalist, was more cautiously optimistic about the station's future: "Al Hura will no doubt be an interesting addition to the plethora of television choices freely available to Arab speakers around the world. The success of Al Hura will depend in large part on the freedom it will practice without being influenced by its owners, paymasters and patrons."

But is Al Hura free from its government sponsors? And is a station like Al Hura necessary in an age where most Middle Easterners who own a satellite dish already have access to the "free press." Depending on where they live they are likely to have access to at least one of these stations: Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN or Al Arabiya. And is the idea of establishing a US government controlled TV station really the model of free speech we would like to establish for the region-or is it, as some suggest, a step backwards?

An equal amount of controversy has been stirred over the Arabic language news station Al Jazeera. Donald Rumsfeld has accused the station of persuading people that the US is an occupying force in Iraq, which he describes as "a lie." He, along with other members of the US administration, also periodically fault the channel for airing some of the more disturbing footage from the region, which in their eyes is tantamount to "incitement." Additionally, Al Jazeera is banned by many of the Middle East regimes, including Saudi Arabia. While Westerner politicians accuse Al Jazeera of having an "anti-American" bias, others in the region occasionally charge that Al Jazeera has pro Western bias. The station often makes use of this fact when defending itself, relying on the logic that if we're making this many people angry, we must be doing something right. And, indeed, the channel has earned as much praise as it has criticism. Many US analysts, such as Thomas Friedman, have hailed the station as a solid step towards the democratization of the Middle East and a model of free speech in a region filled with state-controlled media.

The Media War

At the Middle East Institute Conference at the national press club in Washington D.C., a representative from Al Jazeera and a representative from Al Hura sat together on a panel to discuss media in the Middle East. They were joined by Anthony Shadid from the Washington Post and Jehane Noujaim, director of Control Room, a documentary about Al Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war. Though the discourse was civil, it was clear that there were deep ideological differences that divided them and it did not take long for Al Hura's credibility to come under assault.

Hafiz Al Mirazi, head of Al Jazeera's Washington D.C. office, clearly disliked the idea of a US government sponsored TV station in the region. "Why," he wondered out loud, "do we promote a government-owned media for the Arab world while we're telling them we are working for freedom of speech and we'd like the government to get out of the media business? This is the main problem of Al Hura."

Mr. Al Mirazi also felt that the US government was funding Al Hura for all of the wrong reasons. "[people in Congress have been told that] the only reason... there is anti-Americanism in the region... is the media and Al Jazeera and others. If we can get our message through over there, everything will be dandy and rosy and wonderful. This is a wrong premise. So we have no right to take taxpayer money--including my money--to support something that is based on a wrong assumption and a wrong premise, which is that once we broadcast to them in Arabic and we control the message, everything will be fine and people will be moving around in Arab streets raising American flags. It's not going to solve the problem."

Anthony Shadid was quick to agree that the problem was not within the media, but within the government policies and failures in the region. "The fundamental disillusionment and disenchantment we saw in Iraq had nothing to do with media betrayal, had nothing to do with Al Jazeera, had nothing to do with Al Arabiya," he explained to the audience, "It had to do with the failure of the occupation there. If that's a political way to describe it, so be it, but the occupation didn't work."

Norm Pattiz, head of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors' Middle East Committee, defended Al Hura and explained that criticisms of the channel began before they had even aired their first program. "We were greeted, prior to the launch of Al Hurra, in the Arabic press, before we ever went on the air, with just a very negative press commentary--this was going to be an operation of the CIA, it was going to be a Zionist conspiracy, it was going to try and pollute the hearts and minds of Arabic youth. It was just overwhelmingly negative. I am very pleased to say that we are getting a better shot from the street than we are from the press, and that the numbers... are indicating that we are now a serious factor in the media scene."

Pictured: Norm Pattiz joins the panel discussion live via Satellite

Mr. Pattiz and Mr. Al Mirazi also traded barbs about the content of their respective stations. To illustrate what he sees as the bias of Al Hura, Mr. Al Mirazi used the 9-11 Hearings as an example: "Al Jazeera," he noted, "covered the Condi Rice hearing in the Congress answering about the charges of Richard Clarke. Al Jazeera covered the Richard Clarke hearing and the Rice hearing. Al Hura covered only Rice answering Clarke and did not cover and carry live the Richard Clarke hearing."

Mr. Pattiz, who expressed a certain degree of respect for Al Jazeera, also accused Al Jazeera of running inflammatory advertisements for its news coverage. "Our marketing on Al Hura promotes freedom and democracy and those kinds of values. Here's what your marketing showed. It showed the Sheikh Yassin funeral. It showed demonstrations of large groups burning and stomping on American and Israeli flags. It then immediately cut to a group of Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall, and then it immediately cuts to scenes of Israeli soldiers in conflict with Palestinian youth. That was not reportage. That was the promo that was promoting your news department over the course of several days, over and over again."

"If that's the kind of marketing that you guys are comfortable with," he added, "so be it. I think that people in the region ought to have another choice that they can choose to watch or not choose to watch. I don't see how our being there presenting another point of view and a different perspective could be anything but positive."

Government Sponsored VS. Government Controlled

Both Al Jazeera and Al Hura are government sponsored. Al Jazeera is paid for by the government of Qatar. Al Hura is paid for by the United States. Yet both stations are clear to draw a distinction between "government sponsored" and "government controlled." Both claim to operate completely independently.

Left to right: Anthony Shadid and Hafez Al Miriaz

Hafez Al Miriaz explained that Al Jazeera, ideally, would like to be totally commercialized. "Al Jazeera started to be on a path in which we wanted to be totally commercialized, private, but after five years of getting subsidy from the government of Qatar... we found out that most governments in the Middle East were either intimidating their own private sector not to advertise in Al Jazeera or themselves-- as mainly [the] public sector is the base of the economies over there--they would not advertise on Al Jazeera. So it deprived us from being totally relying on commercial. So we are still continuing to rely on public subsidies from the government of Qatar, but the message that we broadcast, we tell people immediately and make them distinguish that this is an independent network, whatever you name it.

"For example, last week we covered... the General Assembly proceedings and the speeches for heads of state. The first day was President Bush speaking. After him immediately was the Emir of Qatar, who supposedly is owning Al Jazeera, or his country is subsidizing Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera broadcast President Bush's speech and then just did not carry anything, any minute even or any footage, of what the Emir of Qatar is saying, although he's an Arab Muslim leader. Maybe we we're not balanced and we were not nice to him, but this is what decides our coverage, what we feel is newsworthy."

Like the BBC of PBS in America, Al Jazeera can accept government money and still claim to be independent. Many critics continue to wonder, however, whether or not Al Jazeera would ever feel comfortable airing a critical story about Qatar, its host country, or its rulers. Would the Qatari government-which is by no means a democracy-crack down on the TV station it helped create?

Despite a few lingering doubts, no one seems to question that Al Jazeera has had a huge impact on the region.

Jehane Noujaim, director of the Control Room, described her first encounter with Al Jazeera: "I've always been very interested in Al-Jazeera because when I grew up in Cairo, I grew up with pretty much state-run television. When I returned to Egypt--I'd go back every summer, my family lives there--I remember coming back in 1997 and you'd see everybody was crowded around television screens in coffee shops, and satellite dishes were all over, blanketing the city. You started to realize that people were tuning in because there were these debate shows and issues being talked about that had never been talked about before. Once people see, okay, this is being talked about on television, we can start talking about these issues and debating these issues. To me, that's really the first step towards more democratic thinking."

Left to Right: Jehane Noujiam and Anthony Shadid

And what about Al Hura? Is this American creation truly "independent" of the government which funds it?

Mr. Pattiz seems to think so. "I think it's very important to understand what the mission is of US international broadcasting. It's been the same thing for the last sixty years. We are not in the propaganda business. We are not in the psychological operations business. We're not part of the Defense Department... Our mission is the same as it's been since Voice of America went on in the early days, sixty years ago, which is to promote freedom and democracy through the free flow of accurate, reliable and credible news and information about America and the world to audiences overseas. To be, in so many words, an example of a free press, which has been an American tradition."

"The fact that we are not controlled by the administration, that we are not pushing the administration line, should be very clear just by watching the station. When you watch the station, you realize that we are right in the middle of a presidential election here in the United States. We are giving plenty of coverage to the Kerry campaign. The idea that our programs are unbalanced would be very hard to defend--I mean, would be easy to defend based upon people who are actually watching and not people who are talking about what they think it ought to be. We clearly understand that in order to break through and establish the reliability and credibility that we need, we have to be balanced in our approach."

Unfortunately, most Americans will be unable to watch Al Hura in order to make their own determinations on whether or not their content is "fair and balanced." This is due to a U.S. Law called the Smith-Mundt Act, which prevents government created stations overseas from broadcasting in the United States. The purpose of the law is to prevent competition between government stations and US corporate stations. Unfortunately, this means that Al Hura is more or less "off limits" to Americans.

Al Jazeera, on the other hand, will most likely be available to English viewers everywhere sometime next year.

To read the full transcripts from the Middle East Institute's conference, please refer to their website.

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This article is a Middle East Window exclusive. It cannot be republished without the prior written consent of the editor. For information about republication rights, please contact: peter@middleeastfellowship.org