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Al Jazeera Spring in America
In Amman for an International Women’s Forum conference, I discovered Arab TV. This was the spring of 2007, and the Iraq War was going strong fifty miles away. The tiny Hashemite kingdom of Jordan had taken in more than half a million Iraqi refugees, many of them Arab Christians. The Amman Hyatt, where I was staying, had been badly damaged (and several people killed) by a suicide bomber two years before; by the time of my visit, the hotel bristled with security guards carrying automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
The large flat screen TV on the Hyatt club floor, as in such concierge lounges everywhere, played 24/7. The Amman Hyatt had chosen CNN International. Every breakfast and cocktail hour for a week we travelers—Japanese and Arab businessmen and women leaders from Mexico and Argentina and Russia and Ireland and the UAE—were treated to the latest update on the rehab of Britney Spears, over and over and over again.
We American women were acutely embarrassed. There was no apology we could offer for CNN.
Meanwhile, I filled every moment of downtime in my room with channel flipping among a treasure trove of Arabic programming. My favorites were a soap opera set in pre-World War II Bosnia, a historical bodice-ripper from an imaginary Saracen kingdom and the Al Arabiya equivalent of MTV, an endlessly fascinating series of laments in which the man meets the woman in a bar and drives with her into the desert, where she leaves him, alone, bereft, and singing.
And so I began to watch Al Jazeera, in both English and Arabic. Every day its foreign news coverage was a refreshing drink after the trivial and repetitious segments that passed for news on CNN. When I returned home a month later, I was surprised to discover that among the 700+ channels on my Comcast package—no Al Jazeera. To this day, I can imbibe news in Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Portuguese, Swahili, Greek, German, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. I get thirty Spanish-language stations alone.
But in post-9/11 America, in our environment of increasing Islamophobia, we citizens have no Arabic TV, except in a few isolated markets. Why don’t Islamophobes realize that the first task of warfare is know thy enemy? Such individuals, especially within the Bush Administration, should have pushed for Al Jazeera English and Al Arabiya here. Among President Obama’s first foreign policy choices: giving an interview to Al Arabiya and speaking in Cairo. Better than the pretty gestures would have been action to bring Al Jazeera to an America woefully ignorant of the Arab world.
As for me, like other inquiring minds in a supposedly free speech society, I had to settle for watching Al Jazeera on my computer. With the AJ habit for almost four years now, I have been bemused that journalists from Frank Rich to Brian Stelter have only now discovered it. Blog comments and the twitterverse have thrummed with the plaints of ordinary Americans over AJ deprivation.
Yes, Al Jazeera’s coverage of the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East has been terrific—more than terrific—unmatched. It’s amazing what a depth of reportage in the field, by journalists who speak the local language, can yield, isn’t it? And it’s not only that the Al Jazeera reporters coming to us from Tunisia and Egypt speak both English and Arabic, as their counterparts at CNN and NBC et al. do not, but also that the Al Jazeera line-up is more diverse than any in American TV. More women, more of an age range, more people of color—all shades of color.
Al Jazeera employs many non-Muslims. Can any American TV news organization say that it features any Muslim newscasters, at all? This is the true diversity that we Americans—if not all Americans—who value multi-culturalism and internationalism and wide-ranging inquiry would like to see.
So, yes, I totally understand this part of the Arab Spring of 2011: the American spring romance with Al Jazeera. But our AJ discovery is exactly that: an infatuation. Eventually, we must put this new love in perspective. For Al Jazeera is not always a straight talker. As Robert Kaplan put it in his brilliant 2009 essay “Why I Love Al Jazeera,” because its cause is that of the weak and the oppressed, it sees itself as always in the right, regardless of the complexity of the issues.
In December 2008-January 2009,I had the good fortune to be in London, where viewers can choose among a variety of Arabic TV. During the brief Gaza War, I was glued to both Al Jazeera English and Arabic. I hardly left my hotel room. And so I learned that Al Jazeera, just as much as CNN, repeats segments over and over again. But this time the segments, instead of displaying a fairly innocuous infatuation with celebrity, were a kind of indoctrination.
Sherine Tadros and Ayman Mohyeldin of Al Jazeera were the only two English-language reporters covering the war from Gaza. What did they return to several times an hour? The same grisly footage of the same dead Palestinians in street rubble, of the same blood-soaked bodies in a Gaza hospital. The way the videos unfolded, with Sherine or Ayman stepping into the rubble, or with a camera following a doctor down the hospital hallway and into the carnage of the operating room, suggested to the viewer that he or she was seeing something new—not old footage.
Israel kills innocents. This was the message. Al Jazeera drummed it into the viewer, casual and obsessed alike.
Only a month earlier, I had spent a few days with some Al Jazeera reporters at an international broadcast media conference in Valencia, Spain. I had sought the company of these particular other panelists, for two reasons. By that time, I had done a few segments for “The Listening Post” at Al Jazeera English, and I had liked the young woman with whom I had worked. More importantly, I was an outsider in Valencia—not accepted as a peer by the other journalists. But I knew I would feel comfortable among the Al Jazeerans, and I did.
Why were the Al Jazeera reporters outsiders? I can give you no better illustration than the opening night banquet, which featured Spanish ham in every course. No thought had been given to the many Muslim reporters present—from not only Al Jazeera, but also Al Arabiya, Abu Dhabi TV, Arab Broadcast Forum, Arab United Press and Video Cairo Satellite. My table companions could eat nothing; they spent the long hours sipping on orange juice. No one said anything. Palpable to me, however, was the shared discipline of thought: we are used to this; but we take note.
NewsXchange (the conference) was layered with related irony. Where an executive with CBS News (who shall remain nameless) trumpeted loudly (“The ‘stans’—can’t keep ‘em straight!”), the Al Jazeerans, all of whom were western-educated and spoke four or five languages, were quiet. I had never met such a formidably knowledgeable group of reporters (who tend in the West to be more scrappy than well-educated).
NewsXchange had originally been a BBC endeavor, I think. But now the BBC, like all government-supported institutions in the UK, is cutting back (serendipitously, my niece’s husband’s job is relocating 40,000 BBC employees from London to cheaper Manchester). Meanwhile Al Jazeera, supported by the Emir of Qatar, is rich. The network lorded it over the ailing UK and EU broadcast institutions a bit with its conference gift—we all received a blue leather document case embossed with the Al Jazeera logo—and wrapped with snark from the Europeans.
A dinner conversation one night revealed the more persuasive uses to which Qatar money can be put. AJ anchor Sami Zeidan mentioned in passing that he had been traveling through Bosnia on his vacation when he happened upon what he thought might make a good feature for Al Jazeera. In less than a day, he said, the network had chartered a plane to fly in photographers and a support team to help him get the maybe story.
I can think of no other news organization today that has the depth of resources upon which Al Jazeera can call. For that reason alone, we should be wary of our new romance.
The most contentious hour in Valencia was an argument between the BBC and Sky News (reporters, anchors and editors) on the one hand and Arab news organizations on the other about the way in which western news organizations cover the Crescent. The English position: we bend over backwards not to offend the sensibilities of our Muslim population. The Arab news position: English-language coverage of the Arab world is an unfair portrait.
After the debate, I talked for a few minutes with Muftah Al-Suwaidan, the Executive Director of Al Jazeera. From the audience, he had made a few provocative remarks during the session, and he was still incensed. Perhaps that’s why, when I asked him further about Al Jazeera’s mission statement, he said, gesturing to the English newscasters still in the room, “Our mission is the world-wide domination of Islam.”
What Al-Suwaidan did not add, but which I take him to have meant, is this: according to these fool Brits.
But then he said to me quite seriously, “What do we do? We counter the colonial, the colonialist world view of western news.” Whether western media is suffused with colonialism—debatable. But what other news organization than Al Jazeera has a bold, ambitious and clear mission statement? How can any American media empire—all of which genuflect to the dollar and gyrate to pink slips—compete?
Belief trumps resources every time. We are seeing that inexorable truth play out now in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What if belief and resources join? That is Al Jazeera. The network (Al Jazeera Arabic, AJ English, AJ Documentary, AJ Sport, Al Jazeera.net, AJ Media Training & Development Center, AJ Center for Studies, AJ Mubasher/Live, AJ Mobile) is worth watching, even if not embracing, well into the future.
March 7, 2011
[Tomorrow: the missing context for Hillary Clinton’s remarks last week about Al Jazeera]
I had a Persian roommate in college, had many Arab friends in college, and worked in Israel for a time. What Americans don’t know about Middle Eastern cultures is vast compared to what they actually know. Unfortunately, Bush II knew even less than the average American, so the damage is likely irreparable at this point. European ignorance (if that is what it is) is harder to comprehend given the prevalence of Arabs living there.
Your observations are well taken. I’ll add Al Jezeera to my news sources. And just added it to my spell check dictionary;-)