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By
Derek Hoffman
Panel: "Media Diplomacy: Who Controls the Control Room?"
National
Press Club, Washington, D.C.
5-6 October 2004
By far the most lively
panel during October's annual Middle East Institute (MEI) conference
in Washington, D.C., was "Media Diplomacy: Who Controls
the Control Room?" featuring interesting insights from
independent filmmaker Jehane Noujaim and The Washington Post's
Islamic Affairs correspondent Anthony Shadid, as well as some
heated exchanges between Al Jazeera's Washington bureau chief
Hafiz Al Mirazi and Norman Pattitz, who oversees the US-sponsored
Alhurra Arabic-language satellite television station.
MEI Director of Programs
David Chambers moderated discussion and asked participants to
examine the panel's theme from a commercial perspective. As
he said, even for government-linked ventures like Al Jazeera
and Alhurra, media is a commercial industry aimed at attracting
an audience, not an art. In conjunction with this, Chambers
pushed panelists to address how governments influence media
coverage of the Middle East, and whether or not this has contributed
to a "media war" between the US press and its counterpart
in the Arab World.
Egyptian-American
Jehane Noujaim explained how commercial success through her
work at MTV and independent film enabled her to produce Control
Room, a documentary that explores how Al Jazeera and US
Central Command (CENTCOM)--both based just minutes apart in
the tiny state of Qatar--covered the initial stages of the 2003
war in Iraq. Noujaim related her fascination with Al Jazeera
since its inception in 1997, when it appeared to be something
Washington would welcome because of its unprecedented criticism
of Arab regimes. But she noted that many in the United States
ended up demonizing the station as a "Taliban mouthpiece"
that embraced incendiary reporting. Noujaim's goal with Control
Room was to get behind such labels and put a human face
on Al Jazeera, using interviews with its staff to demonstrate
a more "complicated" view: the notion that the station
was not intrinsically hostile to the United States, but was
striving to report events from an independent perspective, albeit
one not always in tune with the US government line. She eschewed
the notion of a media war between the US press and the Arab
press, citing the friendly relations she observed between American
and Al Jazeera reporters who were both covering events at CENTCOM,
and described how upset and surprised Al Jazeera's executive
producer was when he saw a program from a US media outlet that
repeatedly termed his station "anti-American." Noujaim
supplemented her remarks with two clips from Control Room, now
for sale on DVD with extended footage.
The Washington
Post's Anthony Shadid, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting
on average Iraqis in Baghdad during the US invasion, also distanced
himself from the idea of a media war between US and Arab media
outlets. Shadid said he viewed Arab reporters as colleagues
and that he applied to work out of Al Jazeera's bureau in Iraq,
although the station refused. He noted that this turned out
to be for the best, since US forces bombed Al Jazeera's offices
during the war. Instead of strife between respective media outlets,
Shadid saw a more significant conflict between reporters on
one side and governments on the other. He expressed concern
about the lack of protection and respect that political entities
have afforded to journalists, whether in the case of the government
of Israel (where he was hurt reporting) or Iraqi insurgents.
Shadid also worried that the practice of embedding with US forces
in Iraq offered a level of protection, but hampered journalists
from seeing both sides of a story. He acknowledged that his
reporting on ordinary Iraqis could also be perceived as one-sided,
but he felt this perspective was not being given elsewhere in
the US press and that Americans needed to hear it. Shadid expressed
hope that journalists would strive to cover all sides of events
as comprehensively as possible, despite the continuing obstacles
to doing so. Chambers asked Shadid how he managed to report
Iraqis' views during the war without drawing the ire of the
US government, which castigated Arabic satellite stations for
that. Shadid responded that it was a matter of audience. The
US was more concerned about Arab satellite stations because
their consumers were the Arab public, but Shadid's material
was geared for a US audience and would make less of an impact
in the Arab World.
Heated exchanges
between Norman Pattitz and Hafiz Al Mirazi belied assertions
from each of them that there is no media war in the Middle East.
During discussion, the government ties of both Al Jazeera and
Alhurra became apparent. Although Al Jazeera has striven to
be a purely commercial enterprise, it has continued to rely
on support from the Qatari government to survive because Arab
governments have intimidated regional companies from advertising
on its airwaves. This governmental link influences Al Jazeera's
reporting to some extent. As for Alhurra, Pattitz explained
that the US-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) oversees
the station's operation, but that the BBG acts as a firewall
between Alhurra and the US government, which has no say about
the content of broadcasts.
Al Mirazi, however,
asserted that Al Jazeera's reporting was much more independent
than Alhurra's, and he ridiculed Norman Pattitz's claim to the
contrary. According to Al Mirazi, when stations all over the
world interrupted their programming to break the news of Israel's
assassination of Palestinian Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin, Alhurra
kept broadcasting a cooking show. Al Mirazi also claimed that
Alhurra carried only Condoleezza Rice's refutation of Richard
Clarke's testimony, omitting the latter's criticism of the Bush
administration. He added that the independent board that oversees
Alhurra is probably the same one that investigated the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, and that US funding of Alhurra is similar to
that of Halliburton.
Pattitz countered
by explaining that Alhurra is not an all-news network, and aims
to create a niche for itself through a broader range of programming.
He added that Alhurra is not in the policymaking area, and that
the extensive coverage of both the Kerry and Bush campaigns
was evidence of that. Pattitz also noted that Alhurra is in
the model of the BBC, which audiences rate as very credible
despite its ties to the British government. He cited two recent
studies from the French firm Ipsos and America's A.C. Nielsen
that, despite Alhurra's much lower market share vis-à-vis
Al Jazeera and other Arab stations, of those who do watch Alhurra,
between 53 and 66 percent rated its reporting as credible. Pattitz
accused Al Jazeera of using inflammatory images in a promotion
for its news broadcasts, including the Sheikh Yassin funeral,
demonstrations where participants stomped on US and Israeli
flags, and conflicts between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian
youths.
For all the controversy,
those who have spent the most time reporting on the ground from
the Middle East in the past year, Shadid and Noujaim, said that
Arabs have been telling them that policy change, not media information,
is most likely to induce a favorable perception of America in
the Middle East.
A complete
transcript and MP3 audio stream of the panel is online at http://www.mideasti.org/articles/doc275.html.
Based in Egypt,
Derek Hoffmann is a political risk analyst for ISM Transecur,
Inc. A graduate of the American University in Cairo's Center
for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA), he holds a Masters of International
Affairs from George Washington University's Elliott School and
is a candidate for the US Foreign Service.
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