Phil Taylor's papers
|
BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
The War Inside the Arab Newsroom by S M Shapiro January 2, 2005 NYTimes The War Inside the Arab Newsroom By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, the general manager of Al Arabiya, a 24-hour satellite-news channel broadcasting from Dubai, has six plasma-screen TV's in his office on the floor of the channel's glowing, ultramodern newsroom set. They are always on. One is tuned to Al Arabiya itself, and depending on where the cameras are placed, Al-Rashed sometimes catches a glimpse of himself, pacing around his desk on his cellphone. Another shows Al Jazeera, the channel's main competition. A third is tuned to a new Saudi government satellite channel, and a fourth displays CNN. Al-Rashed likes to flip around on the other two -- from Al Hurra, the widely ignored news channel that the United States government started last February, to the BBC and then to Al Manar, the Hezbollah-owned station that was banned by the French and American governments last month for broadcasting anti-Semitic slanders and what a State Department spokesman called ''incitement to violence.'' Al-Rashed's job is to find a place for Al Arabiya within this array, preferably at the top of the ratings. For now, though, it is Al Jazeera, which was started in 1996 by the emir of the gulf state of Qatar, that sets the standard, and the tone, for Arab television news. According to a poll conducted last May by Zogby International and the University of Maryland, Al Jazeera is the first choice for 62 percent of satellite-news viewers in Jordan, 66 percent in Egypt and 44 percent in Saudi Arabia. In most countries in the poll, Al Arabiya came in a distant second, although the professor who designed the poll, Shibley Telhami, said it had captured a ''remarkable'' market share for a satellite channel that, at the time, had been on the air for only a year; 39 percent of satellite-news viewers said they watched Al Arabiya almost daily. And in Saudi Arabia, the biggest advertising market in the region, the ratings race is much closer. Sheik Walid al-Ibrahim, a Saudi, is the owner of both Al Arabiya and its parent network, the Middle East Broadcasting Center, or MBC, the flagship station of which, a ''family entertainment'' channel called MBC 1, has more viewers than any other channel in the Middle East. Sheik Walid started Al Arabiya in February 2003 to provide a more moderate alternative to Al Jazeera. His goal, as he told me last month, was to position Al Arabiya as the CNN to Al Jazeera's Fox News, as a calm, cool, professional media outlet that would be known for objective reporting rather than for shouted opinions. He said he thought the market was ready for an alternative. ''After the events of Sept. 11, Afghanistan and Iraq, people want the truth,'' he said. ''They don't want their news from the Pentagon or from Al Jazeera.'' Sheik Walid's personal political interests may also be a motivating factor. He is the brother-in-law of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; the Saudi royal family dislikes Al Jazeera because it gives air time to Al Qaeda, and one of Al Qaeda's most cherished goals is the overthrow of the Saudi government. And before Al Jazeera, Saudi businessmen owned almost all of the major pan-Arab media, including MBC, the only channel that broadcast news bulletins to the whole of the Middle East, so the country and its rulers were rarely scrutinized by Arab journalists. Qatar's emir allowed Al Jazeera's reporters to take on the Saudis, as well as other governments in the Middle East. Al Arabiya's sophisticated production values set it apart from other Arab news channels. Its sets and graphics have a clean, high-tech look, and its news bulletins are fast-paced -- no item lasts longer than two and a half minutes -- and are introduced with a dramatic drumbeat. While Al Jazeera anchors sit at a desk in front of a drab two-dimensional backdrop that looks a little like a local American news set from the 1970's, Al Arabiya's news is broadcast from the floor of its futuristic in-the-round silver-and-glass newsroom. From its inception, Al Arabiya had a different style than Al Jazeera. There was nothing on Al Arabiya quite like Al Jazeera's signature programs, ''Islamic Law and Life,'' which offers advice to viewers on how to apply Sharia to their lives, and ''The Opposite Direction,'' which features fierce head-to-head debates. But what was reported and broadcast on Al Arabiya in its first months was, at times, similar to what you could see and hear on Al Jazeera. The two stations competed to show the most provocative, gory footage of casualties from Iraq. And after American troops captured Baghdad, Al Arabiya reported, incorrectly, that American forces had carried off all the treasures in the national museum. American military authorities in Iraq and the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council certainly didn't seem to distinguish between the two satellite channels: they considered both to be allied with the enemy. In September 2003, the Governing Council suspended Al Arabiya from reporting on official government activities for two weeks because, the council maintained, the channel was supporting resistance attacks. And that November, the council ordered Al Arabiya to stop all of its Iraqi operations after the channel broadcast a taped message from Saddam Hussein in hiding. At a news conference that month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Al Arabiya ''violently anticoalition'' and in a separate interview said, ''There are so many things that are untrue that are being reported by irresponsible journalists and irresponsible television stations, particularly like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, that are leaving the Iraqi people with a totally imbalanced picture of what is happening in their country.'' When Sheik Walid heard in early 2004 that Al-Rashed had just stepped down as editor of Asharq Al Awsat, a prominent Arab-language daily published in London, he began trying to persuade him to come to Dubai. Al-Rashed, an American-educated Saudi, is well known for his often angry and outspoken columns criticizing Islamic fundamentalism, and especially for a particularly scathing column that he wrote after Chechen rebels seized a school in North Ossetia in September, a siege that ended in more than 300 deaths. ''It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims,'' he wrote. ''What a pathetic record. . . . We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.'' Beyond Al-Rashed's criticism of Islamic fundamentalists, the main target of his wrath is the Arab media. He didn't want to speak on the record about Al Jazeera, but during the three weeks I recently spent with the station's management and staff, he made it clear that he thinks his competition is not just misguided but actively dangerous. ''The region is being filled with inaccuracies and partial truths,'' he told me. (Like everyone I met at the station, he spoke English with me and Arabic with his co-workers.) ''I think people will always make good judgments if they have the right information and the whole information. What we lack right now is the truth and information. After that, we'll have a sane society. Right now it is an insane society because of the way information is being delivered to individuals.'' When Al-Rashed arrived at Al Arabiya, he replaced the news director and hired a new executive editor. The three men share a vision for the station that involves less gore and a wider definition of what is news and what should captivate the interest and emotions of their viewers. The new leadership triumvirate is interested in reporting stories about honor killings and violence against women in Arab countries, a widespread phenomenon rarely considered newsworthy by other Arab media outlets. Al-Rashed and his top editors also push for lighter stories about daily life -- the kind of apolitical features that fill much of the programming day on Western news channels. On directions from Al-Rashed, Al Arabiya anchors and correspondents now refer to American troops in Iraq as ''multinational forces,'' not ''occupying forces.'' He told the producer of ''The Fourth Estate,'' a program that serves as a roundup of Western media, to stop quoting from The Guardian and The Independent, two left-leaning British papers whose content used to provide much of the show's material. One Al Arabiya host told me that she had been instructed to cut off guests who digress into anti-American rants, and other hosts I spoke to said they were being encouraged to ask tougher questions in their interviews. To Al-Rashed, the challenge he faces is much bigger than simply revamping a television channel. His goal is to foster a new kind of dialogue among Arabs, to carve out space for moderate and liberal ideas to enter the conversation, and in the process to do nothing less than save the Arab world from itself. ''People become radicals because extremism is celebrated on TV,'' he told me. ''If you broadcast an extremist message at a mosque, it reaches 50 people. But do you know how many people can be sold by a message on TV?'' Al-Rashed, 49, had never worked full time in television before coming to Dubai. But he knows that television is the medium that is remaking the Middle East, for bad or good. ''I am sitting on a nuclear reactor,'' he said, speaking of Al Arabiya. ''It could produce electricity and light up a city, or it could cause destruction. It's up to the person sitting in the chair where I am sitting to decide which way it will go.'' For most of the short history of the Arab media, television stations have been run by national governments, who used them as extensions of their information ministries. Satellite TV changed that dynamic by allowing Arab journalists to go offshore -- initially mostly to London -- and beam Arab news into the Arab world without fear of being arrested or shut down. MBC was the first network to do so, but after 11 years in London, it was lured in 2002 to Dubai, the glimmering hub of capitalism and tourism in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is a city under construction, 24 hours a day, and what is being built often seems like a caricature of Western excess: an archipelago of man-made islands shaped like the continents; the tallest skyscraper in the world; and, still on the drawing board, the largest mall in the world, replete with an indoor ski slope, and an underwater hotel. As part of the development of Dubai, the emirate established ''free zones'' -- tax-free areas with financial incentives to lure businesses into clustered luxury office parks. The Al Arabiya offices are in the flagship building of Media City, facing a man-made lake with unnaturally even waves, not far from Internet City, Health Care City and Knowledge Village. The chance to be in the Arab world but still removed from the economic and political problems that plague many of its countries proved attractive to MBC and to a number of other media outlets. It also appealed to Al-Rashed. The second of 14 children born to two wives in a middle-class Saudi family, Al-Rashed hadn't lived in the region since he left Riyadh in his 20's to attend American University in Washington. The seven years that he spent in the United States were eye-opening: he watched the Iranian revolution through the prism of the American media and covered events in the early 1980's from Washington for Al Majalla, a Saudi-owned London-based magazine. Al-Rashed moved to London in 1985 and rose through the ranks of elite Saudi-owned magazines and newspapers. He never thought he would return to the Middle East. Dubai, he said, is the only place in the Arab world he can ''exist.'' He sees Dubai as an experiment that could spur reform in other Arab countries and show what can be accomplished with a little openness and less corruption. The population of Dubai is only 18 percent native; the rest of the residents are Western and Arab expatriates and laborers, mainly from India, Pakistan and East Asia who live in camps of squat cinder-block housing and ride back and forth to their work sites in company buses. Young single journalists at Al Arabiya go out to places like the cafe at the Dubai marina, where they can smoke water pipes next to a fountain designed to mimic the sounds of the ocean. In self-consciously ''Arabian''-style restaurants and nightclubs, Al Arabiya employees find themselves in combinations that would be unlikely in their home countries: one night atop the Royal Mirage rooftop bar, I sat sipping cosmopolitans with a Sunni, a Shiite and a Maronite Christian, all from Lebanon. With its Disneyesque Arab souks in which you can purchase Arab handicrafts or a Cinnabon, Dubai seemed like an elaborate stage set for modernization in the Arab world, a shallow facade of empty skyscrapers with -- so far -- nothing but sand behind them. Al-Rashed has been in Dubai for nine months, and he misses his house in the Kensington neighborhood in London, where he lived alone and where most of his possessions remain. He occupies an apartment suite in a downtown hotel, but he has barely set foot in the kitchen, and the bedroom serves as little more than a warehouse for half-unpacked suitcases and dress shirts still in their boxes. I met him at his place one morning in December, and we rode the elevator down to a cafe in the lobby for breakfast. He beamed politely at our waitress, Almira, a petite Indonesian woman in a lavender fez-like hat and apron whose name tag read ''Amy.'' ''I missed you,'' he told her, his dimples flashing. ''You were gone so long over Ramadan.'' Halfway through his croissant and latte, his cellphone beeped with a text message from the news director at Al Arabiya: ''Wael Essam is arrested by Americans.'' Wael Essam, or Wild Wael, as Al-Rashed likes to call him, is Al Arabiya's correspondent in Falluja. He is only 27, and he has something of a reputation as a renegade. He was the only reporter who was able to get into Falluja at the beginning of the American offensive in November without being embedded with the United States military. From inside Falluja, he delivered breathless reports on Al Arabiya, his brow furrowed with intensity, his camera spinning from plumes of smoke billowing over the city to black-hooded fighters gathered in a lantern-lighted room. In a report I saw, the insurgents spoke calmly, not in the formal, didactic style of the kidnappers on beheading tapes; they were obviously relaxed around Essam, even when they were telling him that they were registered to commit ''martyr operations.'' Essam was born in Qatar, to Palestinian parents. He attended Baghdad University, where he was president first of the Palestinian student group and then of the Arab students' union. He started working for Al Arabiya in 2003 as a reporter. Partly because of his student-government position, Essam had connections to families in Falluja and to former members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist government, and last April he began pestering his editors to let him report from Falluja. Salah Negm, who was the news director before Al-Rashed arrived, refused to give Essam the assignment, saying it was too dangerous. So last April, Essam used his vacation time to travel to Iraq from Dubai and ''embed'' himself in a house of insurgents in Falluja. Essam spent the summer back in Dubai, working in the newsroom. In the fall, when the American military authorities in Iraq announced plans to retake Falluja, Essam knew he wanted to return there. He couldn't bear to be in the office any longer, he told me. ''I hate it too much,'' he said. ''You just stay in your chair just taking news from wires.'' Al-Rashed was hesitant about sending Essam to Falluja, because, he said, Essam is ''hot-blooded.'' When Essam threatened to use his vacation time to go back, Al-Rashed relented. Overall, Al-Rashed has been happy with Essam's reports from Iraq. The Al Arabiya Web site featured them prominently, detailing Essam's journey through Falluja, from his close calls with insurgents and American marines to the ''large predatory mosquitoes'' he encountered just outside the city. Al-Rashed knew it was a great coup to have a reporter behind the lines in Falluja -- American and British television journalists couldn't safely report from there, and in August Al Jazeera was banned from Iraq altogether by the government of Ayad Allawi. Al-Rashed, finishing his croissant, did not seem particularly fazed by the text message about Essam's capture. If Essam was in American custody, Al-Rashed reasoned, he was less likely to be shot or blown up. ''The chance that he was going to be killed was a lot higher than that he would be arrested,'' he said. ''If the Americans have him with two legs and two arms, that's good news.'' (He was right to be sanguine, as it turned out; Essam was released a few hours later.) American troops have killed three Al Arabiya employees in Iraq. Ali al-Khatib, a reporter for the channel, and Ali Abdul Aziz, a cameraman, were killed last March by American gunfire near the site of a rocket attack on a Baghdad hotel. Mazen Al-Tumeizi was killed by a missile fired from an American helicopter in September while he was reporting live on a crowd celebrating in the streets of Baghdad after an attack that destroyed a Bradley fighting vehicle. Even more Al Arabiya employees in Iraq have been killed by insurgents. In late October, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the Al Arabiya compound in the Al Mansour neighborhood in Baghdad, killing five, wounding dozens and destroying the channel's Baghdad office. Al Arabiya, like many Arab news stations, received threats from Islamist groups, by e-mail and posted on Web sites, in the preceding months. A group called the Jihadist Martyrs Brigades took credit for the attack. In its dispatches, members had criticized Al Arabiya for giving the new Iraqi government overly favorable coverage. They called Al Arabiya a ''terrorist channel'' and suggested that its name, which means ''the Arab,'' should be changed to ''the Hebrew.'' After the attack, Al-Rashed's first directive to his Baghdad staff was to get on the air. Within minutes, he was on the phone to his roving anchor in Baghdad, Najwa Kassem, a serious, high-cheekboned veteran of five wars. It was important to send the terrorists a message, Al-Rashed told her, that they had failed to drive the channel out of Iraq or off the air. Kassem was in the compound during the attack, and she had been thrown onto some broken glass by the explosion. She was still helping wounded co-workers when Al-Rashed got her on the phone. After she spoke to him, she began reporting live by telephone from the blast site, and as soon as the channel's video feed was fixed, she was on the air, saying in a shaky voice that the bodies of her colleagues were too torn apart to identify. The list of the dead, she said, was being determined by who was missing. I watched the tape in the Al Arabiya office, and it is powerful footage. Kassem's face looked strangely naked -- it had seemed inappropriate to wear makeup for the broadcast, she told me last month -- and she spoke urgently, affecting none of the rhythmic speech and eyebrow-lifting of a typical rehearsed report. In the days following the report, Al-Rashed said, a group called the Baath Party Arab Congress began to post reports on its Web site threatening Kassem by name. One, issued on Nov. 13, charged Kassem with being the ''organizational point-person'' responsible for ''the dissemination and perpetuation of falsehoods against the resistance'' and labeled her ''the prime-mover of such a policy at the present time.'' After Al-Rashed read the statements and other warnings, he reversed his earlier instructions to Kassem. Without saying why, he told her she would be fired if she didn't go to Beirut immediately. It was only after she had arrived that he told her her life had been threatened. Many employees in Al Arabiya's newsroom have intimate connections with the conflicts they cover, and not all of them agree with all of Al-Rashed's ideas. There are Sudanese Arabs, Palestinians who grew up in Syrian refugee camps and a reporter who had been a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. There are also several former Al Jazeera employees. Some were poached for their expertise; others defected because, they said, Al Jazeera's management these days is too Islamist for them. Women were discouraged from wearing tight pants, they said, and some men refused to shake your hand if they knew you didn't follow Islamic law. The job of overseeing a staff of reporters that comes from so many places, geographically and politically, falls to a man named Nabil Khatib. Al-Rashed didn't hire Khatib directly. He hired Khatib's boss, Nahkle El Hage, a former executive at MBC who is now the news director at Al Arabiya, and the first thing El Hage did in his new position was hire Khatib. El Hage knew Khatib from the 12 years Khatib spent as MBC's bureau chief for the Palestinian territories and Israel. El Hage was impressed by what he saw as Khatib's sense of fairness, even when it caused trouble for MBC. ''I took a lot of heat for his coverage,'' El Hage said. ''At seminars and parties, people would ask: 'How can you be neutral on Palestine? Why don't you say martyr?''' -- meaning that Khatib should have been using the word ''shahid,'' or martyr, to describe Palestinian suicide bombers. ''I was glad we didn't,'' El Hage went on. ''Nabil was the most evenhanded reporter in the region.'' Khatib's desk is just outside Al-Rashed's office. There is a constant rhythm going on all around him -- urgent bleeps from the wire services, the ring of his office phone and the warble of his cellphone. He answers most calls with the same deep-voiced greeting, ''habibi,'' which means sweetheart, an endearment that he also finds the opportunity to murmur to a surprising number of co-workers. Khatib has a 5 o'clock shadow, and dark bags draw his big, bloodshot eyes downward. His head and shoulders seem permanently rounded forward, even when he is not staring at his computer monitor. A pack of Dunhill Lights usually sits by his keyboard. Khatib is a big man, but he used to be even bigger, and these days his clothes bunch baggily at his waist. In the four months he has worked at Al Arabiya, Khatib has lost 36 pounds. One evening he complained to me that he had not seen his baby daughter in two weeks, because she is asleep when he arrives home at night, and she is still asleep when he leaves in the morning. Woefully, he described the time he made his wife meet him at a nearby mall for lunch so he could see her and his daughter. ''I had only time for coffee and to kiss her,'' he said. ''Calls came in the entire time.'' Khatib was hunched at his desk one morning over the story lineup for the next bulletin, typing, when Wael Essam called. Essam was upset that his most recent report from Falluja had been broadcast only twice over the weekend. Khatib hadn't seen it. Essam later told me that he puts in these sorts of phone calls fairly regularly to both Khatib and Al-Rashed, complaining that his reports aren't getting enough air time. ''We are the only channel that has this kind of tape!'' he said he told them. ''Why didn't we show it every hour? We have to show it many times!'' Khatib punched a few keys on his computer, and Essam's latest report popped open on his screen. At this point, the American operation in Falluja was winding down. But according to Essam's report, American harassment had not ended. ''More than 200 families in Falluja are under siege by troops,'' Essam's voice said on Khatib's screen. Khatib leaned in and asked: ''What does he mean? Let us see.'' An Iraqi man angrily told Essam's camera: ''They are not allowing us to go out of our homes. They are arguing when we say we need to go out. They say snipers will shoot if you go out.'' ''Well, that doesn't sound like a siege,'' Khatib mused. ''Maybe a curfew. Let us see.'' Then his cellphone chirped. He took the call and muted the audio but kept watching the screen. While he talked, on the video Red Crescent workers searched for a missing man, and a woman sobbed in a rage inside her damaged house. Essam cut to a close-up of holes in her walls. Khatib hung up, raised the volume and translated for me. ''The woman says she lost her son in this house and now it is damaged,'' he said. ''She is screaming, 'Where should I go now after I lost my house -- to sleep in the street?''' The next scene showed families leaving their houses to go to a Red Crescent shelter. Khatib rewound the video and played it again. The families loaded into the car again. He rewound again to the beginning, where the man described not being able to leave his house because of snipers. Khatib played the video through to the end, where Essam signed off, sitting casually on a ledge at the Red Crescent shelter with a group of families, new refugees in their own city. Khatib thought he saw a contradiction there. Essam was reporting that families couldn't go out because of snipers and curfews, but in the second part of the clip families were shown leaving their houses to go to shelters, walking in the street with American soldiers in the background, who did not appear to be shooting at them. Khatib said: ''I have the feeling that he didn't care that much about being accurate. He just wanted to explain that the people of Falluja are suffering in many ways.'' A little later, Khatib crossed the newsroom floor to head down to the cafeteria for the one meal he eats a day. When he sat down to his meal, his phone rang again. It was Essam. He still hadn't seen his report back on the air. Khatib asked if the curfew Essam described was in place throughout Falluja. Then he asked about the scenes of American soldiers standing around people on their way to shelters. Essam explained that the second scene was from another area in Falluja, which is not under curfew. Khatib told him: ''If there's still a place where people can't go out, you have to say it is just that part where they can't go out. There is no reason to exaggerate tragedy. The pictures are strong, but it's a big problem for viewers to think everyone in Falluja cannot leave his place.'' Essam's segment was not broadcast again. Khatib and Al-Rashed share many of the same views about journalism. They are both idealistic about the transformative social power of objective journalism, and both want to push Al Arabiya toward a less emotional, more measured view of the Middle East. But they came to these ideas from experiences that were almost completely opposite. Al-Rashed's political perspective evolved at a distance from the Arab world, in the United States and England, where he seems to have found life more pleasant, rational and interesting than it is in Saudi Arabia. Khatib's life and career, by contrast, have been bound up in the claustrophobic conflict he was born into. Khatib is the youngest of seven children raised by a widowed mother in Nablus, in the West Bank. He said he first got the idea to be a journalist at age 15, in 1978, after he spent three months being interrogated in an Israeli jail before being released without charges. He was frequently beaten, he told me, and during one such beating, by an Israeli officer who called himself Captain Uzi, Khatib was told he had been arrested for incitement. Khatib didn't know what the word meant. After his release, he asked his oldest brother. ''Incitement,'' his brother told him, ''is journalism.'' When Khatib graduated from high school, he was eager to do whatever he thought would make Captain Uzi most angry, so in 1981 he applied for a Palestine Liberation Organization scholarship to Belarus State University in Minsk to study journalism. His courses trained him in the Soviet art of creating propaganda on behalf of the proletariat. During his sophomore year, when the P.L.O. mobilized students on campus to go to Lebanon to fight the Israeli Army, Khatib was inspired to join, and he persuaded a friend, who was studying medicine, to come with him. When they arrived, Khatib said, he quickly realized how woefully unprepared they were for war. Neither had been given any military training. His friend was killed in front of him, and two weeks later Khatib had had enough. When he flew back to Minsk, his anger had a different focus. ''I was ready to die for a cause, and we were excited to fight for justice,'' he said. ''But it gave me a difficult question about good and bad: Who are these politicians who decide I should go to war when I don't know how to fight -- really to send me to a war when I am not a fighter -- because they want to make a strong showing numbers-wise? Who decided it was the right thing for me to leave my studies?'' After he completed his Ph.D., Khatib returned to the West Bank, where he started his own news agency and eventually became bureau chief for MBC. Reporting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict brought him close to death again and again. He watched as his colleague Nahum Barnea, a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, discovered that his own son had been killed in a suicide bombing that both men were covering. He reported in Hebron in 1994, after Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims at prayer. He was looking over a list of the dead when an illiterate woman asked him if her son was included. His was the first name on the list, but Khatib couldn't bear to tell her. Khatib does not discuss these experiences easily, but their imprint on him is apparent. He has a sense about him that there is weight to the task he has been charged with: there is something irrevocable about making a mistake, about getting information wrong. He is clearly sickened by the media landscape of the Arab world. ''Sensationalism incites people to hatred,'' he said. ''I have smelled the blood of hatred, and I cannot understand how someone in an air-conditioned newsroom feels that he has the right to manipulate people's emotions, to rile people up or to generalize about a group, when he sees the repercussions.'' More than anyone else at the station, Khatib was deeply frustrated by the ground rules of Arab TV journalism. Aside from the obvious ethical concerns an editor has about sending a reporter to dangerous places like Iraq and the West Bank, he said, there are other dangers involved in dispatching reporters to Arab countries where there is little or no freedom of the press. ''If in Libya or Egypt I push someone to tell a story that will get him in conflict with the authorities,'' Khatib explained, ''I can't tell them, 'We need it.' Because it goes without saying that this subject is dangerous. This applies to most of the issues that matter -- all the things related to corruption and political conflicts.'' Al-Rashed told me that Al Arabiya can't report freely on the Saudi government because it is Saudi-owned, and the channel is unable to cover Algeria at all right now. Al Arabiya's correspondent has been prohibited from reporting for the last eight months by the government of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the recently elected president: during the election, the reporter had predicted that Bouteflika's rival would win. The central problem, as Khatib sees it, is that although Arab journalists have access to state-of-the-art technology, the governmental and civic structures needed to support a free modern press don't exist in the Middle East. ''CNN works in an environment that supports CNN,'' Khatib explained. In the United States, ''there are groups that regulate the media and protect the public interest. There is rule of law and access to information.'' Not so, he said, in nearly every Arab country. Even basic information like demographic statistics is treated as if it were a state secret, and it is almost impossible for the channel to report on the inner workings of Arab governments -- how budgets are drawn up or how leaders are chosen. To Khatib, those stories are much more important than the daily dose of news from Israel that is a prerequisite for Arab stations, both the old government mouthpieces and the new satellite channels. ''People are lazy,'' Khatib said. ''And Israel is a safe target. The access is easier there than in many Arab countries. But this reporting doesn't help Palestinians know which mayoral candidate to vote for.'' Khatib is in the minority in the newsroom. Right next to his cubicle sat Abdelkader Kharoubi, then the assignment editor. Kharoubi told me that he thinks it makes sense that the Israel-Palestine bureau is Al Arabiya's largest and most sophisticated, because that conflict, he said, is a tragedy unsurpassed in human history: ''Nothing like this ever happened in the world. What happened in Palestine is the most horrible murder in the history of humanity.'' Kharoubi said he thinks that Al Arabiya's reporters should always refer to Jerusalem as '''occupied Jerusalem,' with the emphasis on 'occupied.''' There is a general feeling around the Al Arabiya offices that since Al-Rashed was named news director, the channel has become pro-American. Kharoubi agrees. Recent injunctions from Al-Rashed and Khatib to balance coverage in Iraq have gone too far, he said. Al-Rashed told me he thinks Al Arabiya's coverage of the Iraq conflict overemphasized civilian deaths in Falluja and played down American military successes against terrorists. Kharoubi thinks the opposite. ''How can you 'balance' civilian deaths?'' he asked me. ''Maybe you could show dead soldiers, but the American government doesn't even want us to show them. When you talk about the agonies of civilians, there is no way to balance it -- they are a different category of people. The Iraqi government says, 'Please concentrate on positive aspects.' Why should we concentrate on good things?'' Kharoubi recently went in to Al-Rashed's office to express his concern that the station's portrayals of the American military and the Iraqi interim government were too positive. He was worried, he said, that it put the channel's Baghdad staff at continued risk. ''One concern I mentioned was that we don't want them to be killed again,'' he said. ''Not by Americans or terrorists.'' He also said that the recent direction in Al Arabiya's coverage means a risk of losing viewers. ''If we keep talking to Arab viewers as if this government'' -- the Allawi government in Iraq -- ''is going to introduce democracy, as if the U.S. Army are very nice occupiers who kill only terrorists, then they won't switch us on,'' he said. When Al Arabiya's reporters were killed by Americans, Al-Rashed said, the station received hundreds of condolence calls from journalists at other channels, and the reporters were mourned as martyrs. By contrast, after the Al Arabiya bureau in Baghdad was bombed by insurgents, Al-Rashed said, only a few of his colleagues offered a single word about the five employees who died. Diar al-Omari, an Iraqi-born reporter for Al Arabiya, worries that the channel is increasingly seen in the Arab world as being too partisan toward the Allawi government. ''In Iraq we are losing sympathy,'' he said. ''People are not looking to Arabiya as an independent channel.'' Ehab Elalfy, 30, a burly, bearded Al Arabiya reporter from Egypt, was very happy working at the station until the last few months, he told me. On one afternoon when I visited with him, Elalfy returned from midday prayers to find that he had been assigned to write an item from a wire report on the aftermath of an insurgent attack on American-trained Iraqi soldiers in Mosul. He winced when he got to a line in which an American military spokesman said, ''Twelve more unidentified bodies were found by multinational forces.'' Elalfy said no one specifically told him to stop using the phrase ''occupying forces'' in bulletins, but whenever he does, it is edited out. This isn't the only change at his job that he is annoyed by. A few months ago, he would run searches on Google Arabic every hour or so looking up words like ''Zarqawi,'' the name of an insurgency leader. He would often find a page that was up for just a few hours with a videotaped threat or hostage tape and take it straight to his editor. He said he's proud that because of those efforts, the station was sometimes able to play such tapes before Al Jazeera. But lately his bosses don't seem as interested. As an observant Muslim, Elalfy didn't like these tapes -- he said he thinks they violate Muslim laws about how to treat prisoners of war, especially women and civilians. But still, he thought they belonged on TV. As Elalfy typed up his report, Rana Abu Atta, a young Al Arabiya reporter from Saudi Arabia with short, curly black hair pulled back with a headband, swung by Elalfy's desk to see if he wanted to get in on her lunch order to Burger King. Elalfy scowled at her. ''Oh, sorry, I forgot!'' she said, and laughed. For the last eight years, Elalfy has boycotted American products, because, he told me, ''American products help the U.S. administration earn more profit, and they use that profit to provide Israel with weapons to kill Palestinian civilians.'' Until recently, it was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that dominated Elalfy's imagination and passions. He recently completed an unpublished novel titled ''Me and Best Wishes,'' about an Egyptian journalist who plans to visit the Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem but doesn't want to recognize the legitimacy of Israel by crossing its border legally. So instead, he sneaks across the Lebanese border with suicide bombers. Elalfy's protagonist is sidetracked in Lebanon when he falls in love with a Palestinian girl, who is killed by an Israeli airstrike. Hopeless, the protagonist decides to ''avenge her death'' by taking part in an attack on Israeli soldiers. In the smoke-filled stairwell of the MBC building -- where employees conduct business while chugging cigarettes and sipping foamy Nescafe dispensed by a machine -- Elalfy told me that part of the reason he wants to be a novelist is to inspire pan-Arab nationalism. Elalfy said that all Arab lands should be one country; it is ridiculous, he said, that he has to apply for a visa to enter Lebanon. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former president of Egypt, is his hero, because ''when Egypt came to freedom, it helped all Arab countries become free.'' Elalfy recently started work on a new novel. It is about Iraq, the issue that has joined the Palestinian situation for him as the most pressing and important in the Arab world. It is based in part on his experiences reporting for Al Arabiya from Iraq a few months ago. In Iraq, Elalfy reported stories that were close to his heart and also didn't hesitate to involve himself in what he was reporting. He told me about one incident in which he saw an American soldier manhandling an Iraqi and picked a fight with the soldier. Elalfy said that while reporting from Falluja, he helped pull civilians out of rubble. He kept a little girl's dust-covered green plaid dress and mounted it in a wood frame. ''It was a child named Hannin's,'' Elalfy said. ''She died holding it, and her brother said I could keep it.'' I sat with Elalfy one day when he was asked to take two sound bites from a 45-minute speech by Allawi. He wanted to follow one of Allawi's statements -- that suicide operations in Iraq are not true jihad -- with a statement from an imam saying that in fact they are. But his editors wouldn't let him. ''There's no balance between the points,'' he said, shrugging, seeming defeated. When he finished the report, he drove back to the Gardens, the beige-and-apricot complex where Media City workers live, rubbing a fragrant Egyptian oil on his hands to kill the cigarette smell, a Palestinian kaffiyeh wrapped around the headrest of his passenger seat. It is unclear if the Department of Defense has changed its view of Al Arabiya since Donald Rumsfeld called it ''violently anticoalition'' a year ago. ''At this point in time, we do not want to offer our evaluation of the editorial content or direction of a particular news outlet,'' a Department of Defense spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, told me late last month. George Bush did choose to give Al Arabiya an interview after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and Al Arabiya's business manager, Shafaat Khan, said he was visited by a few American generals in the summer who wanted to establish friendly relations. They summed up their view of the Arab media by saying that as they understood it, ''Al Jazeera is very, very bad, and Al Arabiya is bad.'' But on the newsroom floor, producers and editors said they find it difficult to get the American perspective when they want to put it on the air. On Nov. 19, gunfire broke out at a mosque in northern Baghdad. Khatib said he immediately had a local sheik on the line offering his account of the attack: that the United States Army opened fire on civilians. But Khatib saw in the footage an exchange of fire and wondered if the mosque had been harboring fighters. He spent the 45 minutes until air time trying to get an American or Iraqi government account of the incident; three hours later, he still didn't have one. ''To my surprise,'' he said, ''the opposition is doing better, P.R.-wise, than the official Americans and Iraqis, who are not as readily available for comment to give their side as the opposition. The militants are ready with a video of masked men and a person available for comment a half-hour after the story breaks.'' Khatib went ahead and broadcast the segment on the gun battle at the mosque without the Army's side of the story; he said that the segment looked unbalanced but that he had a choice between an incomplete segment or not covering the fight at all. The United States government's primary strategy with the Arab media has been to create its own outlets -- the satellite-news station Al Hurra and Radio Sawa -- at a cost of $100 million, rather than engage aggressively with existing Arab media stations. But as a result, there is no easy mechanism for journalists at these stations to find American voices, even ones that might be able to make a sympathetic case to Arab viewers. One night, Nael Najdawi, a middle-aged producer in suspenders, ran up to me in the newsroom, his glasses bouncing off the cord around his neck. He asked me if I knew anyone who was related to a victim of the Sept. 11 attacks. I said that a woman in my neighborhood whom I had met a few times lost her brother. ''Can we get her to go live for the 10 o'clock bulletin?'' he asked. Officials in the State Department's public diplomacy division have argued for more direct engagement with the Arab media. But Norman Pattiz, a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who masterminded Al Hurra and Radio Sawa, told me he thinks that view is mistaken, because it ''presupposes that the indigenous media is the solution, not the problem.'' Pattiz speaks about the Arab media as a monolith. In a recently published essay, he wrote: ''Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya transcend traditional media roles. They function, in effect, as quasi-political movements, reflecting two of the defining characteristics of the Middle East today. One is the lack of political and press freedom. The other is Arab nationalism. Arab networks manifest both.'' He said Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya do this by covering news that Arab regimes suppress and stories that ''intensely arouse Arab passions,'' namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq. Among experts who track the Arab media, there is a debate over whether this kind of coverage is good or bad for the prospects of democracy in the Middle East. Marc Lynch, assistant professor of political science at Williams College, agrees with Norman Pattiz that the satellite networks focus on hot-button issues -- his recent research broke down coverage on Al Jazeera since 1999 and found that the top three topics shifted among Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Arab political reform -- but to Lynch, this makes Al Jazeera the most pro-democracy of all the stations in the Arab world: it reflects public opinion and opens up space for political debate. William Rugh, a former United States ambassador and now an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, likewise thinks that the dialogue on Al Jazeera, heated though it may be, opens up discussions that force authorities to be more accountable. But he says that Al Jazeera's attention to controversial issues and different points of view has not translated into democratic politics. ''That next step has not been taken as you might expect in terms of bringing democracy to the Arab world,'' he says. ''People haven't formed political parties and interest groups. You can't assume that just because there is a lot of shouting going on that there is a lot of transparency and accountability going on.'' S. Abdallah Schleifer, director of Adham Center for Television Journalism at the American University in Cairo, says that part of a healthy democracy is that there are certain ground rules for discussion. ''The danger of a press moving from an authoritarian mode is sensationalism, which is sometimes evident in Al Jazeera,'' he says. ''Things are said on that network that would never be said in England and America because they are moving into uncharted territory, and so there are no taboos, no libel and slander, no limits to what one says.'' Schleifer went on to say that he hopes Al Arabiya's more cautious and more professional approach will provide a foil for Al Jazeera: ''It might show that you could have a free press operating but with manners, and democracy depends on good manners.'' Khatib said he plans to stay at Al Arabiya for only a year. Although Dubai is an easier place to live than Ramallah, he said he doesn't want to stay because he is troubled by the ''huge gap'' between Dubai and the world Al Arabiya broadcasts to. ''In New York, as an editor, you can go have coffee, and everything around you gives you the feeling of the place,'' he told me one day in the newsroom. ''Working in Cairo, just going to work in the morning as an editor, you might see 10 people asking for money and come up with 200 stories. In Dubai, the most you see on your way to work is traffic.'' Khatib said that people in Dubai ''don't live in the real world, the Arab world, and this affects the depth and the richness of our reporting.'' Gesturing to the newsroom, he said: ''They convey reality through glass. It's fake. I don't want to be like those who are away from the public. I felt this the first day I was here. If the network succeeds and I stay, I will lose what made me a good journalist.'' But when pressed, Khatib also admitted that he is not enthusiastic about returning to his bureau in the West Bank. He said he is always treated as a Palestinian first and a journalist second, being held at checkpoints for hours en route to appointments. And he said that at times, the struggle to offer calm reports about a painful situation was overwhelming. ''I am tired of the process,'' he said, ''and the constant tension to hold my emotions at bay, and I don't feel that in a year or two years it will end.'' Khatib took the job at Al Arabiya, he said, because he thought ''the Arab world was not able to be as moderate and free as it could be, because they are not getting true information.'' He wanted to be a bridge between ideals he holds about journalism and the realities of Arab reporting, and he thought he could have real impact at Al Arabiya. But now that he has been in Dubai for four months, he said late one night in the marble lobby of the MBC building, the distance between those points seems vast. ''I am not sure I can personally afford to pay the price for this success, even if it is possible,'' he said wearily. Al-Rashed is usually more optimistic about the prospects for Al Arabiya, and for creating a truly free press in a region that is not free. But when pressed, he admits that his undertaking is risky, and that the cost of failure would be great. ''In a real way, I have to win this,'' he said one evening as his driver took us to the station. ''I have been preaching for a long time these kinds of thoughts, and if it doesn't work, I have to walk out and say, 'It didn't work -- you're on your own.' I am dragging everyone with me on this. I have to succeed.'' Samantha M. Shapiro is a contributing writer. She last wrote for the magazine about students at an evangelical Christian college. ------------------------ Copyright@The New York Times |