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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
Propaganda TV won't help the U.S. by M Bishara 
Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune |
Propaganda TV won't help the U.S. Marwan Bishara IHT Monday, February 23, 2004 Washington's new channel ABU DHABI Washington's aggressive public diplomacy campaign to improve America's image in the Middle East is failing to win Arab hearts and minds. No matter how slick the product, actions speak louder than words. The latest U.S. public relations drive, the Arabic satellite television channel Al Hurra, will prove no exception to this rule. People will not trust the message if they don't trust the messenger. Al Hurra means "the free one," but the Virginia-based channel, which began broadcasting Feb. 14, is anything but a free enterprise. It is fully dependent on the U.S. government for its initial $100 million budget and will operate under strict official guidelines. If its first big splash is any guide - the channel showed prerecorded interviews with President George W. Bush and Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. secretary of state - Al Hurra's message has already been tainted in Arab eyes. The rationale behind Al Hurra is based on two erroneous assumptions: that satellite networks are responsible for the anti-Americanism in the Arab world and that once America is more clearly heard, it will be more appreciated. Most of the popular Arab networks are sponsored by regimes that are close allies of the United States. Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, the small nation that will house the biggest American military installations outside the NATO alliance. Many executives of Al Jazeera and the other top satellite stations - Abu Dhabi, Al Arabiyya, MBC, LBC and Al Mustaqbal - were either educated in the United States or are veterans of Western state-sponsored media outlets like the BBC or the Voice of America. The news directors of three prominent channels were trained in the BBC or Reuters, and the hosts of two popular "Crossfire"-style programs are a former BBC editor and a former employee of the U.S. State Department. Moreover, and contrary to Western media practices, most Arab correspondents in the West are American or European nationals. These Arab TV journalists could hardly be accused of premeditated hostility or lack of journalistic objectivity. If they were so hopelessly anti-American, Al Hurra wouldn't have wooed people from these stations to work for it. Much of the news content that America seems to complain so much about has Western sources. American and European wire services dominate Arab media coverage of Arab and world affairs because there is no credible Arab wire service. Over the last year, Arab satellite channels have broadcast as many, if not more, official American government and military press conferences and speeches as did CNN and BBC. And under recent American pressures, "do-not" lists were circulated in a number of Arab TV newsrooms, forbidding, for example, the use of "resistance" when referring to the Iraqi insurgency or "American occupation" when referring to the coalition forces. So why is the Bush administration embarking on its own project in Arab broadcasting if the Arab channels' sponsors, executives and news providers are all America-friendly? According to Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of Al Hurra's parent company, the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, the station will report accurate news and will broadcast debates "between a radical Islamic figure and a moderate Muslim" and "let people make up their own minds." But that's precisely where America has been getting a bad rap. Moderates - like radicals, Islamists and secular guests on debate programs - tend to be critical of American foreign policy. I am one of them. In my experience as a political commentator and analyst on television, I have found that news editors are very careful to be impartial and hardly confuse their news with their views. It's not their fault if the news reflects badly on America's policy in the Middle East. After arguing at the beginning of the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that the Bush administration was using claims about such weapons to justify launching a premeditated invasion, I was treated as "anti-American" by my hosts. When I tried to defend my views as more consistent with traditional American constitutionalism and liberal values than Bush's own views, my arguments fell on deaf ears. Contrary to the U.S. government's claims, Pan-Arab satellite television channels have a moderating influence on Arab public opinion. Studies have shown that those who watch Al Jazeera and its competitors are less focused on the question of Palestine - an issue that generally galvanizes sentiments against America in the region - than those who don't. On the other hand, if America would resolve the question of Palestine it could gain a 60 percent favorable rating in the Arab world. Arab networks are still in their professional infancy. But they have proved quick learners and tough competition for established Western media outlets. Their daily struggle to report the news objectively in spite of domestic and regional pressures is the best means of establishing and strengthening a democratic process in their countries. An American propaganda channel, on the other hand, will be democratically counterproductive and will fail to convince watchers of the popular homegrown networks. Once the Arabs see Washington's new "understand-me/love-me" public diplomacy for what it is, an extension of its war efforts in the Middle East, Al Hurra will fail the credibility test. To ameliorate its image, Washington needs policy reform, not improvements in media coverage. Unfavorable opinion of the United States in the Arab world does not exist because people are blind to its values, but rather because they see through the Bush administration's arrogant policy towards them. The writer is a lecturer in international affairs at the American University of Paris and a political analyst for Abu Dhabi satellite television. This is a personal comment. Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune |