(Beirut) In the current war in Iraq, and in Washington’s wider confrontation with the Arab world, the American and Arab mass media have become instruments and weapons of war, as well as targets of war. In the heat of battle, both sides’ mass media reflect the fear and anger that define their societies. Operating according to commercial dictates, they both seek to expand audience share and advertising income. They do this by pandering to, and reflecting, their public opinions.
The result is that Osama bin Laden uses Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya satellite channels to disseminate his views, and the US creates new Arabic-language media channels to send its views to Arab audiences. The Pentagon uses embedded American journalists to reflect its perspectives, and Arab television reporters go to Fallujah and Gaza to show the full consequences of American and Israeli military actions on the ground, revealing much more than the sanitized versions of the US and Israeli media. Arab and American reporters have been killed in the process, and Arab media offices in Iraq have been hit by American air strikes – deliberately, in Arab eyes, unintentionally according to Pentagon investigations.
The transformation of the media from detached chroniclers of events to active combatants on the information frontline reflects a profound change that is only now becoming evident: the mass media is the only sector where the Arab world can engage the United States on equal ground. In all other important arenas – diplomacy, the military, economy, technology – the US is vastly more powerful than the Arab world, and dictates policy to largely compliant client regimes. But within the power of mass media’s dissemination of information by report and analysis, the half-dozen established pan-Arab satellite channels have countered the US mainstream media and fought them to a draw.
Typically, the Pentagon says that its attacks in Fallujah carefully target militants, and Al-Jazeera’s reports on the ground and shows film of dead civilians and bombed mosques. Perhaps other than resistance fighters in Palestine, Iraq and south Lebanon, Arab satellite channels may be the only credible popular symbols of Arab self-assertion and success in a landscape defined by Arab weakness, docility, servility, and humiliation. No wonder 35 million viewers watch Al-Jazeera every day.
In the past two years, the United States has mobilized and deployed in the Arab world two offensive forces:
* battalions of coalition troops that overthrew the former Baathist regime in Iraq and now occupy and administer the country, and
* battalions of Arabic-speaking journalists who man three new American-launched mass media operations designed to change Arab perceptions of the US and its aims in the Middle East (Al-Hurra television, Radio Sawa, and Hi magazine).
US government military and media battalions are experiencing mixed results.
Washington policy-makers appear totally befuddled as to how to respond to the rise of Arab satellite television. Initial response has been embarrassingly naïve and ineffective – to whine and complain, and then attempt to provide new sources of information from, and for, the Middle East.
Senior administrators such as Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld routinely criticize pan-Arab television, especially Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya, for inaccurate reporting and inciting Arabs to kill Americans in Iraq. Just last week Powell raised this issue in public when he met the Qatari foreign minister in Washington (the state of Qatar launched and largely finances Al-Jazeera, which is autonomously managed). The Arab-owned stations reply that they are doing their best to report facts on the ground, including the fact of rising anti-American sentiments.
Arabs are angry when they see dead Iraqi infants with half their skulls blown away by American missiles. Arab satellite channels convey this reality, they don’t manufacture it. If Arabs are increasingly angry at the US – which they certainly are – this is mostly the consequence of American military and political policies in the Middle East and not the reporting of these policies by Arab television. This is very simple: most of the world disagrees with US policies in Iraq and Palestine, and the Arab media reflect this fact. Shooting the messenger won’t change the reality.
The American focus on the Arab mass media as bad guys is a classic example of irresponsible scapegoating and only aggravates the genuine problem. Mainstream American politicians and mass media seem desperate to find any plausible reason to explain away the rising tide of anti-American sentiment in the Arab and Islamic world and in most of Europe rather than face the actual reasons. Negative public reaction around the world is against the violent and hegemonic bias of American foreign policies.
The Arab media is a particularly inappropriate candidate for Washington’s misdirected ire also because the American mass media behave almost identically. American and Arab media mirror and pander to their publics. They promote a rising tide of patriotic sentiment, stereotype and even demonize the other, and resolutely and irresponsibly refuse to probe into the underlying reasons for the opinions of the other side.
The Arab media have done a poor job of explaining why Americans have supported their government’s foreign policy. American media have failed to explore in any depth why the US has been targeted by terrorists.
The counterposed opinions in the US and the Arab world are very troubling, for they comprise a volatile combination of anger, fear, ignorance, and an almost Pavlovian need for revenge and retribution. George W. Bush drives the common media message in the US that Islamist militants want to destroy American civilization, and Osama bin Laden drives the common corresponding message in the Arab world that the US and Israel are engaged in a campaign to re-colonize the Arab-Islamic world and transform its values and identity.
Both these perceptions are grievously flawed and exaggerated. Yet they tend to drive public opinion in both regions, and they define much of the tone of media coverage, which has become a proxy target in this widening war of our times.
Copyright © 2004 Rami Khouri
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Released: 5 May 2004
Word Count: 980
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