Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
The Battle for Arabic Television and Radio Audiences (interview N Pattiz) 
Perspectives Air Wars The Battle for Arabic Television and Radio Audiences EVERY DAY MILLIONS OF ARABIC TELEVISION viewers across the Middle East are bombarded with anti-American sounds and images. What they see from state-run channels and from the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network is a nonstop barrage of incendiary images. What Arab viewers see from America, however, is a blank screen. This will change, if Norman Pattiz gets his way. Pattiz is spearheading an effort to create a new noncommercial television news network targeted to the Middle East. The proposed network would look and sound much like CNN, except the United States government would own and operate it. Pattiz is a member of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees all international nonmilitary broadcasting, such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. He's also a member of the advisory board of RAND's Center for Middle East Public Policy. He's leading a project to beam the "message of America" into the homes of 170 million Arabic-speaking viewers. The project's name is the Middle East Television Network, or simply MTN. An overwhelming majority of Arabs say television is their first and main source of news, according to Pattiz. He claims there's a media war being waged in the Arab world, and the United States is not even on the playing field. The weapons include hate radio and television, incitement to violence, disinformation, government censorship, and journalistic self-censorship. "We need to have a place where people can go to learn about U.S. policies, what U.S. culture is about, and who we are - from our own lips," said Pattiz, who recently spoke at RAND. "Right now, people in the Middle East do not have a place to get that information. And they're not going to have a place to get that information unless we create it." Under the auspices of the BBG, Pattiz has already launched a highly successful radio station called Radio Sawa. Working with moderate Arab governments, Pattiz gained access to FM radio frequencies within a number of key countries and cities (see sidebar). The Arabic-language station offers a blend of news and popular music from both the Middle East and the West. The target audience is listeners 25 years of age and younger, who represent nearly 65 percent of the region's population. "We thought by creating a music-driven format that we could attract the largest possible audience to what was also our public diplomacy mission," said Pattiz. Unlike the staid format of the Voice of America, this novel music-driven approach was controversial at first. Critics included the Middle Eastern media, who lambasted both the project and Pattiz. Even skeptics in the United States claimed he was turning venerable international broadcasting into MTV. "The greatest message in the world doesn't mean a lot if no one is listening," said Pattiz. "To be effective, radio needs to connect with its listeners." It did. A recent 500-person, eight-week survey in Jordan found that 89 percent of those polled had listened to the station the day before. Also, 35 percent said they listened to Radio Sawa for news, compared with only 5 percent for the BBC. By some accounts, Radio Sawa has become more popular than even the radio station operated by Saddam Hussein's son, an FM station that previously had been the most popular in Iraq. Press accounts have noted that Radio Sawa has begun to change the lexicon in the region. For example, the station's news reporting recast "martyrdom operations" as "suicide bombings." Apparently, this paradigm shift resonated with listeners. With the runaway success of Radio Sawa, the White House soon solicited Pattiz for his thoughts on Arabic television. "Television networks in the Middle East, Al Jazeera and other government networks, are much like television networks in the United States today," explained Pattiz. "They do not form public opinion; rather, they pander to it, they react to it." In a commercial enterprise, he said, you identify your audience, and you give them what they want. Al Jazeera staffers are smart, and they see commercial media trends in the United States. As such, they have positioned themselves among their viewers as the Arabic CNN. But according to Pattiz, "they're more like 'CNN meets Jerry Springer.'" He noted that Al Jazeera knows what "turns on" its audience. In the Middle East where everything runs emotional, "turns on" in reality means "inflames." "That's why discussion programs are really screaming or yelling matches. They resonate with their audience," said Pattiz. "If Al Jazeera had a slogan, it would be 'all intifada all the time.'" Enter MTN. "Our mission is a journalistic one," said Pattiz. "Our mission is to promote freedom and democracy through the free flow of accurate, reliable, and credible news and information about America to audiences overseas. Our mission is to be an example of a free press in the American tradition. It's silly not to take advantage of the things that we do better than anyone else in the world." What this broadcasting effort is not intended to become, according to Pattiz, is a propaganda mission or a front for the U.S. Department of Defense. "There are even some people who think I have an insidious plan to create some commercial enterprise in the Middle East and that I'm pursuing this to feather my own nest," said Pattiz. "I'm not." Whatever the motive, the political response to MTN has been overwhelmingly positive. "The White House has endorsed the concept of Middle East television." Pattiz also said key members of House and Senate authorizations committees have signed onto the project. "But they are authorizers. They aren't appropriators." That means they haven't given him the money yet. Still, Pattiz is optimistic about the future of MTN. He's hoping to get enough money in the 2003 budget to launch the project and then hopes to secure the lion's share of funding in the 2004 budget. "In the Middle East, you have people who don't care what the United States has to say," said Pattiz. "They don't like our policies. They believe they know our policies, which have been introduced to them in an environment that is hardly friendly to the United States. "We need our own pipeline into the region. We need to control our own distribution so that we're the masters of our own fate," he said. "Because who's going to play our message if not us?" Radio Sawa, a new Arabic-language station, offers young people throughout the Arab world a blend of news and popular music from both the Middle East and the West. The station broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on the following FM frequencies: Amman, Jordan: 98.1 Kuwait: 95.7 Dubai, United Arab Emirates: 90.5 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: 98.7 Doha, Qatar: 92.6 Radio Sawa on medium wave (MW): Egypt, Levant: 981 and 1260 MW Iraq and the Persian Gulf: 1548 MW Radio Sawa is also available via Nilesat, Arabsat, and Eutelsat and can be heard by streaming radio at .
COURTESY NORMAN PATTIZ Lady Liberty graces the screen of a video proposing the launch of the Middle East Television Network. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Battle Wombs Why Some Drug Babies Are More Equal Than Others SEE A "CRACK BABY" ON TV - physically harmed by the mother's use of a drug - and you'll probably feel contempt toward the mother. See a "fertility drug baby" on TV - physically harmed by the mother's use of a drug - and you'll probably feel compassion toward the mother. The difference, according to Lynn Paltrow, a civil liberties attorney specializing in reproductive and health issues, is that crack mothers are typically portrayed in the media as African American "welfare queens" and fertility drug mothers as wholesome middle-class homemakers. Paltrow, who recently spoke at RAND, contends that contemporary drug laws are used unfairly to punish African American mothers. Paltrow admits there are differences between fertility drugs and cocaine. But if anything, "much more has been proven about the potential harm from fertility drugs and carrying multiple pregnancies to term than from prenatal exposure to cocaine," she said. "A lot of how we develop policy around pregnant drug users is much more about politics, race, and class than it is about scientific analysis of the risks of harm." Paltrow described a low-income African American woman whom she had previously represented in court. The woman gave birth to a child who tested positive for cocaine. The state of South Carolina charged the woman with child abuse on the theory that a fetus in South Carolina is really a person and that the woman's drug use was therefore child abuse. The child, however, was born without health problems. According to Paltrow, the woman stood before the judge and asked, "Your Honor, I have a problem. Could you please help me get into a residential [treatment] program?" He said, "No, I think I'll just send you to jail." And he sent her to jail for eight years. Paltrow compared this woman to another in the Midwest who took the fertility drug Fertinex. This woman had been advised that if she became pregnant with more than two children, she would be jeopardizing the health of all the fetuses. The only way to reduce the risk would be to perform selective abortion. She became pregnant with six fetuses and decided to carry them all to term. One baby died, one has a severe disability, and all of the five surviving babies require special health care. What did the mother get? A donated van, a glowing article in Good Housekeeping, and praise from millions of Americans. "If one were to be consistent about viewing fetuses as persons and holding mothers accountable for the outcomes of their pregnancies, you would have to treat these two cases identically," said Paltrow. "In fact, the fertility drug mother should - under this punitive view - be considered more culpable, because she had a fetus who died." To date, no state legislature has made it a crime to be pregnant and addicted to drugs. However, individual prosecutors continue to pursue such charges. In South Carolina, where a judicial rewriting of the child abuse statute has redefined a fetus as a child, any risk of harm to a fetus may be treated as child abuse. "There's something irresistible about these cases to local prosecutors who want to look like they're doing something about the war on drugs, who want to appeal to their right-to-life local constituencies," said Paltrow. What's more, in at least 18 states, a single positive drug test at delivery is considered a basis for reporting an incident of civil child neglect. Without any evaluation of parenting ability, a single positive drug test could result in a child being taken from the mother and put in the foster care system. "I keep imagining an opportunity to stand in front of a panel of legislators and smack down on the table a cup containing my urine sample and say, 'Okay, maybe there's cocaine in there, maybe there's marijuana in there, but what does that container tell you about whether I make dinner for my children every night? Whether I do homework with them? Whether I love them and am capable of caring for them?' "And yet, our presumptions, our prejudices about drug users and particularly mothers is so extraordinary that that cup alone, in some states, might be enough to remove my children and put me in the position of having to do anything the state tells me to do in order to get them back." A woman in California tested positive for a drug, and her child was instantly taken away. "It took her three months to get her child back - even though the positive test was due to a drug given by physicians during labor," said Paltrow. "She was a woman of color." She described the case of the Medical University of South Carolina, where the patient base is 70 percent African American. In 1989, a white nurse decided to do something about cocaine use among her black patients. In coordination with the hospital and local police, she established a policy to search pregnant woman for evidence of cocaine use. If positive, that information was turned over to the police. The women were taken out in chains and shackles, some still pregnant, some still bleeding from having just delivered a baby. "They didn't say, 'Gee, we're a hospital, maybe we should see if we have any treatment programs,'" said Paltrow. "They didn't say, 'Let's do research and see if cocaine really is as damaging as we think.' They simply had a meeting with the police and the prosecutor's office." Of the 30 women arrested, 29 were African American. For the only white woman arrested, the nurse wrote in her medical record: "Patient lives with her boyfriend who is Negro." Paltrow was part of a team that challenged the legality of the hospital's policy in the U.S. Supreme Court. The team argued that the testing policy constituted an illegal search, that in the guise of providing medical care, the hospital was secretly searching these women without their consent, without a warrant, and in violation of the Fourth Amendment. DIANE BALDWIN Lynn Paltrow is the founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. "We did ultimately win, in part because we were able to say this isn't just about pregnant drug addicts," said Paltrow. "If it had been, we probably would have lost. This is about public hospital patients. If you can use doctors to search patients, then all people going into their doctors' offices are not safe. I think that bothered six of the justices." According to Paltrow, we all buy into the illusion of ready access to drug treatment. "Among prosecutors, among judges, there's this idea that you can just call up and get yourself into a program," said Paltrow. "I've had a hell of a time finding treatment programs for my clients. "I'm not suggesting that these women are just victims and that there's no accountability or responsibility involved," said Paltrow. "However, my clients have taken many steps to be responsible. They have called abortion clinics, sought drug treatment, and asked their friends and neighbors for help. "What I see over and over again is that there are barriers every direction they try to move to improve their own lives," said Paltrow. "The discussion now must shift from personal responsibility to some kind of collective and social responsibility, so that when these women do act responsibly, a door is not closed in their faces." One step in the right direction, according to Paltrow, is improved training in substance abuse issues for child welfare workers. The lesson for policymakers, she said, is to base policy on science and research, not on emotion or media hype. |