 |
 |
 |
 |
| Search |  |
 |
 |
Let the viewer beware A few years after the Gulf War, several prominent U.S. journalists began to publicly discuss the failures of their coverage of the conflict. How long, I wonder, will it take them to do the same regarding the “war on terror” that’s happening now? In this case, management of war reporting by military handlers is not the main issue. What the US media will probably reflect on later is its ambivalent position towards Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite TV channel that has suddenly entered the broad Western consciousness by airing the notorious Osama bin Laden tapes, in full and uncensored. There would be little point in condemning the US media outright. Even with regard to the five big TV networks, we don’t know what pressures they were under before they agreed to edit out the “inflammatory” parts of bin Laden’s speeches. Perhaps their agreement to censor their Al Jazeera feeds came in return for greater – if still highly limited – access to battle zones for their own reporters. Nevertheless, the idea that coded messages would be transmitted via the US networks’ replaying of the tapes seems fairly absurd. The networks would surely have been doing some editing anyway, such as running an English-language voiceover on top of the original. The real threat is Al Jazeera itself, broadcasting in Arabic to millions of viewers per day, most of them in the Middle East, with another million or so in the United States. So the question is, can the US government muzzle Al Jazeera – and would it? Whatever the failings of their Middle East coverage, US journalists usually recognize the value of media freedom. And some coverage in the mainstream US has been sympathetic to Al Jazeera. In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece on October 22, two Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee lobbyists, Hussein Ibish and Ali Abunimah, presented a compelling account of the “revolution in Arab news media and public opinion” that Al Jazeera has spearheaded. Their argument, too, looked a touch disingenuous, telling how the station “has evoked the wrath of almost every Arab government,” without mentioning its reluctance to criticize its own royal patrons. But an important point, made in the New York Times (of all places) on October 15, is that Arab American viewers are tuning in to Al Jazeera in record numbers – not because they agree with the anti-US rhetoric that is sometimes expressed on the station, but because Al Jazeera always brings in “the Arab point of view.” That’s something the big American TV networks consistently fail to do, especially when reporting on any aspect of the conflict between Arabs and Israelis. “Most Americans just can’t understand the depth of frustration we feel when the American news organizations never recognize the Palestinian perspective,” a 67-year-old Lebanese-American baker in Alexandria, VA, explained in the New York Times report. Given Al Jazeera’s success, could other Arabic news stations – maybe ones with slightly different ideas about what constitutes a “balanced” perspective – be on the horizon? American media behemoths CNN and MSNBC have recently launched Arabic-language news sites on the Internet, so you have to wonder about TV stations too. What CNN and MSNBC will have to realize, though, is that unless their Arabic subsidiaries are allowed to give some coverage to Israeli acts of aggression and Palestinian suffering, they will never be taken seriously by Arab viewers. We in the media all have our patrons, and to some extent those patrons have the right to pursue their own agendas. Journalists have to make pragmatic compromises, but without losing sight of the principles of the profession. We have to be discriminating about our sources. But in the end, TV viewers – just like magazine readers – have to be discriminating too. NEIL MACDONALD |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Site Developed and Maintained by the Business Information Center of AmCham Egypt Copyright©2008 American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt |
|||
 |
|||