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By
Lawrence Pintak, TBS Senior Editor
"Anyone
who tells you they are not scared silly is lying,” retired
Annahar publisher Ghassan Tueni, the living symbol
of Lebanese media independence, said in mid-autumn as we sat
in his office overlooking Beirut’s port and newly reborn
downtown. “We built this glass tower as a symbol of the
new Lebanon. Now it has become a fortress under siege. I’m
waiting for someone on one of those ships out there to fire
a rocket through my window.”
Two months later, his son, Annahar publisher Gibran
Tueni, was dead; his armored sports utility vehicle torn apart
by a remote- controlled car bomb. The assassins struck less
than 24 hours after the heir to the journalistic dynasty returned
from Paris, where he had been in self-exile after being warned
he was at the top of a hit list. Media has always been a tool
of power, nowhere more so than the Middle East. With the levers
of media control, and thus the power to shape perceptions, slowly—very
slowly—beginning to shift away from governments, Arab
journalists are being buffeted by an array of competing forces
as they attempt to redefine themselves and their profession.
"Profession”
That word alone epitomizes the sea-change underway in a region
where reporters have too often served as apologists for dictators
and autocrats or sold their souls for an envelope of cash. Most
Arab journalists remain subject to pressures that range from
subtle political “guidance” to threats of imprisonment
and death, as the assassinations and attempted assassinations
of journalists in Lebanon so vividly demonstrate. Yet as I travel
the Arab world these days, I am struck by the newfound sense
of professional purpose among journalists.
I am part
of a generation of American reporters who flocked to journalism
schools in the early 1970s. Vietnam and Watergate had inspired
us to believe we could change the world. That same sense of
excitement can today be found among aspiring young Arab journalists.
“I can’t criticize from within my country,”
wrote one of my students at The American University in Cairo,
explaining why she wanted to report for the Arab satellite channels,
“but journalism allows me to criticize from outside
and begin to make things different.”
Even many
of the graybeards of Arab journalism have a new view of themselves
and their mission. “We can’t say the government
changed the media, we changed the media,” says
Hassan Amer, a long-time reporter for Egypt’s official
press who recently founded an independent newspaper called Al
Fajr (The Dawn) to signify that a new day has arrived.
“We face pressures but enjoy a lot of freedom now. Even
in the national newspapers, there is a lot of change taking
place.”
If US public
diplomacy czar Karen Hughes had truly wanted to learn about
the transformations underway in the region during her so-called
“listening tour” in early autumn, she would have
done well to trade her string of photo opportunities for a few
days shadowing the reporters and news media barons at the vortex
of Middle East change.
Everywhere
the rules are in flux; everywhere reporters struggle to maintain
their equilibrium on the constantly shifting sands. In Egypt,
the recent elections resulted in a slight loosening of the reigns
on media, but numerous journalists—including the Al Jazeera
correspondent—have been attacked and beaten and others
are left wondering whether overt restrictions will return. In
Iraq, the deadliest place in the world for reporters, journalists
are killed for being perceived as too close to the government,
too close to the resistance or too close to particular political
parties. Saudi Arabia’s Al Watan has gone through
four editors in recent years as news executives have tried to
interpret conflicting signals from within the House of Saud.
Lebanon
has always been the region’s media Tower of Babel; its
highly ideological press representing—often bought and
paid for by—a range of Middle East governments and political
movements. That’s still true. What has changed is the
way reporters look at themselves and each other. The media-led
popular uprising against Syrian occupation has produced a new
sense of mission. Journalism itself is emerging as a new ideology.
“We feel we can no longer just represent some, we must
represent all,” explained a young reporter with the traditionally
pro-Syrian newspaper Assafir, which is reevaluating
its own mission following Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon.
But life at the hard edge of media independence can be dangerous.
While Karen
Hughes was posing with establishment preachers, prime ministers
and smiling babies in late September, reporters in Beirut were
reeling under the shock of an assassination attempt on one of
their own. May Chidiac lay unconscious and badly burned in a
Beirut hospital, her left arm and leg blown off by a bomb placed
under the seat of her car. The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation
anchor and talk show host had been an outspoken critic of Syrian
involvement in Lebanon.
Hurtling
down the coastal highway from Jounieh to Beirut after a televised
media solidarity rally a few days after the attempt on Chidiac’s
life, anti-Syrian radio talk show host Rima Njeim fielded serial
phone calls—one hand on the wheel of her BMW, the other
on the phone—as her producer, Johnny el-Saddik, told me
of the endless death threats Njeim receives from what Lebanese
reporters have come to call “the unseen hand.” Warned
one email: “We know where your children go to school.”
Unlike Njeim, many reporters in Lebanon no longer drive their
own cars for fear of what might happen when they turn the ignition
key.
In a twisted
kind of way, the attacks on Lebanese reporters are a compliment
to the growing influence of Arab journalism. In the weeks before
his assassination, former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was called
in by Syrian President Bashar Assad and ordered to either force
Annahar, the country’s most respected mainstream
daily, to end its criticism of the Damascus regime or sell his
20 percent stake in the company. In one of the small glassed-in
offices off the Annahar newsroom, a Lebanese flag is
draped over the chair of Samir Kassir as a memorial to the outspoken
columnist whose white Alpha Romeo exploded in a ball of flames
in late spring. “I still can’t believe it,”
whispered reporter Roula Mouawad as she paused before the glassed-in
office. On a plaque beside her was etched Kassim’s likeness
and the dates: 1960-2005. “We have to fight for them,
and the next,” she said later over coffee, referring to
her fallen colleagues. “Because there will be
a next.”
Another
kind of war is being tought between journalists and the powers-that-be
in other parts of the Middle East. In Jordan meanwhile, media
reform is being trumpeted as a harbinger of greater political
reform. A panel discussion about media liberalization organized
by the Jordanian government at an international conference in
Amman turned into a free-for-all as Jordanian journalists mocked
the government’s decision to scrap the ministry of information
and repeal a key press law.
“You eliminated one law but there are 22 others on the
books that can send us to prison,” one reporter shouted
at then Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher. Yet the fact that
the event, broadcast on Jordanian TV, even took place was itself
an indication of the dramatic changes underway.
In the
Gulf meanwhile, the media operates under strictures less visceral
than in the Levant, but equally real. “What kind of pressures
do you face?” I asked the editor of one Gulf paper after
chatting about the recent attacks on Lebanese journalists. “None,”
he replied. “We don’t report about political issues.”
Complained another senior Gulf editor: “Our press is infected
with the self-censorship virus.”
That is
not the only chronic ailment still contaminating the culture
of Arab journalism. “How can we talk about media reform
when a whole people are imprisoned in their own country?”
one Arab reporter angrily challenged a group of colleagues discussing
the future of journalism in the region. That fixation on resolving
the Palestine conflict before tackling any other issue plays
right into the hands of authoritarian regimes like Syria, which
have long used the confrontation with Israel as an excuse for
tight media control.
There is
contradiction wherever you turn. Oman and Bahrain have, respectively,
issued licenses for their first private television and radio
stations, but for most of the past year, the prime media engine
in the region, Al Jazeera, has been banned from operating in
a half-dozen Middle East countries, including that supposed
bastion of democracy, Iraq. And for all the talk of independence,
both Al Jazeera and its rival, Al Arabiya, face red lines around
issues it is “better” that they not touch.
Then there
is the whole issue of money. Economic sustainability is one
of the greatest challenges to media organizations in countries
transitioning from an authoritarian model to a free press. The
tendency is for a plethora of media organizations to spring
up in the first heady days after deregulation, fragmenting the
market and making it difficult for anyone to make money. As
Russia exemplifies, the survivors are frequently gobbled up
by business tycoons—usually cronies of the government-of-the-day—and
the rest are susceptible to economic coercion, becoming mouthpieces
for political parties and special interests. The Arab world
may well be in the process of skipping that intermediate, free-for-all
step.
Idealistic
startups like Jordan’s first private FM station, Ammannet,
a spin-off of an innovative Internet radio station based in
the West Bank, are exceptions to the rule. Unlike the Balkans
or Africa, there’s plenty of capital in the Middle East,
so poor, scrappy journalistic entrepreneurs are few and far
between. Instead, the overwhelming number of pseudo-independent
media outlets in the region are owned or heavily-influenced
by members of royal families, such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya
and its cousin MBC; tools of mega-rich would-be politicos and
influence peddlers, such as Hariri’s Future TV and Michel
Murr’s soon to be revived MTV in Lebanon; or bully pulpits
for political parties and preachers of every stripe.
It all
comes back to power. The emir of Qatar didn’t finance
Al Jazeera to get a membership card at Washington’s National
Press Club. He did it for the same reason he invited the US
Central Command to set up shop—to make himself a player
in the region. That’s also why the Saudis and Emiratis
are building media empires in the Gulf, Jordan’s King
Abdullah is talking up media liberalization and Syrian intelligence
thugs and their Lebanese minions are killing journalists. It
all has to do with power and how it is leveraged. Arab media
may be helping to fuel political reform but it also remains
a prisoner of those reforms.
As the
assassinated columnist Kassir put it exactly a year before his
death: “Thanks to a handful of journalists, we have indeed
re-conquered our freedom of opinion and expression—if
not yet fully our freedom of information.”
Whether
it is in Al Jazeera’s newsroom in Doha or on the mean
streets of Beirut, wherever I talk to Arab journalists these
days, I hear a guarded hope that change is on the way—and
a pride that they are helping to bring it about. But after each
trip, I return home wondering whether this newfound sense of
mission will be nurtured by the atmosphere of political reform
it is helping to foster or whether Arab journalism will ultimately
trade one master for another, stifled by economic forces and
bullied by political muscle manipulated by those who would be
king.
Lawrence Pintak’s new book,
Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War
of Ideas (Pluto/Univ of Michigan Press) was published in
January 2005.
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