The Media Missionaries

7. THE MIDDLE EAST

REGIONAL OVERVIEW

To understand why independent professional media are important, just look at the cost of their absence in the Middle East. Most Arab countries have imposed severe government restrictions on media, thwarting the possibility of even-handed, fact-based journalism. The sanctioned coverage has served for decades to divert attention from local accountability, enflaming passions and sharpening biases rather than elucidating facts. America has been a favorite surrogate target. As this report goes to press, people in many Arab countries are taking to the streets in violent protest, claiming America is the primary source of their woes.

At the same time, the international press is being targeted deliberately by the Israeli military and police engaged in the conflict. On April 4, 2002 for example, Israeli soldiers attacked reporters with tear gas and stun grenades as they covered the Israeli assault on Ramallah. (1) With threats rather than weapons, the Palestinian Authority also barred journalists from covering street celebrations after the 9/11 attacks on America. (2)

This has never been a hospitable region for journalists or U.S.-sponsored media training. The U.S. government did some limited media development work in the 1990's, mostly in the narrow area of Palestine, the West Bank, and Gaza. (3) A few ngos also contributed. Sadly, their handiwork now is in jeopardy. The Ford Foundation, Internews and Soros' Open Society Institute helped create a television station at Al Quds University in Ramallah. Modeled after American public television, it offered an alternative to the authorized propaganda and game shows typical of the region, with live sessions of the Palestinian Legislative council and a Palestinian-Israeli version of "Sesame Street."One of the station's founders, Daoud Kuttab, endured a week in Palestinian jail for airing a legislative debate on corruption in the Palestinian Authority. But on April 6 he wrote on AMIN.net (Arabic Media Internet Network) that Israeli soldiers had sacked the station. The staff were arrested and held for four hours by the Israeli soldiers. Video archives, equipment and cameras were destroyed. "Five years after launching our first broadcast, our dreams have been shattered," Kuttab said. (4)

During the Israeli attacks in April, 15 television stations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank--encompassing all indigenous television capacity for the Palestinians-were destroyed, according to Whayne Dillehay of ICFJ. Internews and others would like to do a damage assessment of the West Bank media.

A few U.S. reconciliation groups have been at work here for decades, including such creative efforts as the Search for Common Ground's U.S- Iran wrestling tournament. Internews started the AMIN.net website to post Palestinian and other Arab newspaper articles and to monitor journalism attacks, but otherwise by 2002 had largely moved out of the Middle East. AMIN.net has had no funding for the past two years, but it gets 3.9 million hits a month, about half of what Al-Jazeera gets, David Hoffman said in May 2002.

ICFJ trained reporters in war-torn Algeria how to use investigative reporting techniques to cover human rights issues. ICFJ also completed a three-year program on investigative reporting in Lebanon, bringing the best local reporters to the U.S. for internships at U.S. papers.

At press time, some media development work continued in Lebanon, Jordan and Qatar. BBC and the Reuters Foundation had training centers in Lebanon. Knight fellow Joanne Levine was in Amman, Jordan, working with the indigenous Women's Media Centre. The State Department issued a request for proposals for $1 million, 3-month projects on media development in the Middle East, Gulf States, and Central Asia. ICFJ planned to go ahead with a new VOA contract to train Al-Jazeera television journalists.

While the current cycle of violence makes it difficult to conduct effective training here, this may be the right time to rethink how to approach the Middle East's chronic media problems. This mission is both more difficult and more urgent since media have become an important factor in the deteriorating state of U.S.-Arab relations. For example, The New Yorker magazine and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman provided chilling reports after 9/11 about how pervasive and influential the anti-American press are in Egypt. Preposterous conspiracy theories about Jews creating the 9/11 attacks are commonly believed, and editorials by Egypt's leading newspaper editor suggested that the U.S. poisoned relief packages and was guilty of war crimes for dropping food packages in areas that had been land mined. Unfortunately, the Egyptian press are the media opinion leaders of the Middle East. Regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia have escaped accountability by encouraging their tightly-controlled media to blame the U.S. for economic, political and other problems, and by punishing the press if they criticize their own governments.

Professional, balanced journalism is not available to most Middle Eastern citizens. "The practice of freedom of speech is still something new in Arab media. Objectivity is a very subjective issue," said Al-Jazeera editor Hafez Al-Mizari. (5) David Hoffman of Internews argued for a comprehensive media development campaign instead of the U.S.'s propaganda approach toward the Middle East. "People who have been propagandized all their lives welcome the alternative of fact-based news," he contended in a recent Foreign Affairs article. While open media don't automatically guarantee moderation, they at least offer "new space for moderate voices that can combat anti-Western propaganda." (6) He noted that the World Bank's World Development Report found that countries with privatized, local independent media had better economies, less corruption, and higher rates of education and health.

Why wasn't more done in quieter years to spread the journalism gospel throughout the Middle East, as Americans did throughout the post-Communist world and elsewhere? One can speculate about a combination of regional factors: long-standing Arab hostility toward America because of its support of Israel; U.S. government disinterest in undermining the authority of autocrats who otherwise are helpful to U.S. oil and security interests; and the lack of local democracy movements necessary to sustain independent media.

Locals have paid a high price for promoting press freedom here. The Jordan Press Association, to which all local and foreign journalists in Jordan must belong in order to work, in 2000 expelled its own secretary-general, Al-Hadath editor Nidal Mansour, for starting a new press freedom organization, the Center for Defending the Freedom of Journalists (CDFJ). The JPA complained that Mansour was no longer working full time as a journalist and had accepted foreign funding for CDFJ, which violated JPA's rules. Mansour also lost his job as editor of Al-Hadath. (7)

CASE STUDY: "AL- JAZEERA: THE TINY STATION WITH THE BIG MOUTH"

The most controversial news organization in the Middle East is Al-Jazeera television, which exclusively received and broadcast Osama bin Laden's videotapes after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When Al-Jazeera was started in 1996 by the foreign ministry in Qatar and some former BBC Arab employees, it looked like progress. One Al-Jazeera editor remembered how favorably CBS's "Sixty Minutes" profiled the new network, calling it "the tiny station with the big mouth." Al-Jazeera soon was ruffling Middle Eastern rulers by courageously showing interviews with Israeli leaders and critical coverage of Arab regimes. (8) ICFJ has a new grant from Voice of America to assess the need for training Al-Jazeera journalists.

By Sept. 11, 2001 Al-Jazeera seemed to have dropped the BBC approach to become aggressively one-sided. Critics nicknamed the station, which is funded with $30 million from the Qatar government, the Bin Laden Broadcasting Corporation. (9) "Day in and day out, Al Jazeera deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage," Prof. Fouad Ajami charged in The New York Times magazine, arguing that even when the station interviewed American officials, it was setting them up with biased insinuations. Al-Jazeera provided one of the Arab world's few opportunities to watch President Bush and other U.S. officials tell their side of the story after 9/11. But when Al-Jazeera planned to interview Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on April 5, 2002, protests from Palestinian officials, nearly 150 Arab journalists, and people gathered outside the network's Arab League summit headquarters prompted them to cancel the interview on "technical" grounds. Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rbbo had asked that the network cancel the interview because it wasn't "appropriate that he, a war criminal, be given a chance to appear on an Arab media platform." (10)

Ironically, Al Jazeera has adopted America's media culture while expressing the Arab world's anti-American bias. Even before 9/11, the network was mimicking the worst standards of Western media. "They are sensationalist, the political version of Jerry Springer," said Lebanese newspaperman Hisham Melem.(11) As David Hoffman observed, the majority of people in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Iraq are under 25, and they have a love-hate relationship with America. "The same youths who shout 'death to America' go home to read contraband copies of Hollywood magazines." (12)

Satellite television like Al-Jazeera, while prohibitively expensive for most Arab citizens, is one of the least censored media in the Middle East. A half dozen other Arab-owned international satellite channels began broadcasting to the Middle East before Al-Jazeera. The relatively staid Middle Eastern Broadcasting Centre (MBC), for instance, which is owned by a relative of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, has a slightly larger news audience than Al Jazeera and twice as many overall viewers. (13)

Islamic fundamentalists also are taking to the airwaves. Al Manar television in Lebanon and al Mustaqbal in the West Bank town of Hebron are closely tied to Hezbollah and Hamas, Hoffman said. "Because these stations employ higher standards of journalism than local state-run media, they have enjoyed sizeable audiences who come to them for the quality of the news, if not the Islamist messages and propaganda they scatter within." (14)

Joel Campagna's essay in CPJ's 2001 annual survey observed that the Middle East missed out on the post-Cold War trend toward democracy. Media are either controlled outright, with no room for dissent, or undermined by draconian laws, censorship and harassment. The most extreme examples continue to be Iraq and Libya. In Algeria, Jordan and Syria, new press-related criminal laws were enacted in recent years. Most countries banned or confiscated foreign publications if they said anything deemed unfavorable to the current regime. (15) Journalists were attacked, jailed and murdered with impunity across the region during 2001. Campagna noted that journalists in Israel were regularly harassed and injured by Israel Defense and security forces, as well as by some militant Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories.

Despite this bleak landscape, there were pockets of progress. Private publications have sprung up alongside the controlled media in some countries. Courageous journalists continue to struggle against their fetters, including Morocco's Le Journal Hebdomadair and Demain Magazine, and Lebanon's weekly Al Nahar. The Internet, new Europe-based pan-Arab newspapers, and regional satellite channels including Al-Jazeera, Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBCI) and the Middle East Broadcasting Centre, which is run out of London, are evidence that governments don't control all the news, CPJ noted. Affluent viewers in Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries can bypass the official media via satellite dishes, which carry international as well as regional programming. Opportunities may exist in Syria, Morocco, Kuwait and Lebanon for some media training, under the right circumstances.(16) Bahrain's new emir is pushing political reforms that may improve media freedom.

Print journalism, particularly from Egypt, shapes elite and political opinion in the Arab world. Television is important, but radio is the medium of choice for most Arab citizens, as it is in other undeveloped regions such as Africa and South Asia. The Internet provided a bright spot for Middle Eastern journalists and activists. The estimated 4 million Internet users in the Arab world will double by the end of 2002, CPJ predicted. (17) The greatest concentration of Internet users are in the Gulf States, where Dubai has become a regional hub.