It’s interesting to see that many in our public discourses, our public officials like to blame the Middle Eastern media for all the problems in the peace process and also the anti-Americanism that is obviously sweeping the region. Sure, there are faults in the media, and the media has been uneven in the region. But the reality is that the problem is considerably bigger. If you look at the media today in the Middle East, in comparison to what it was 10 years ago, it is actually far better than it was. What we have to come to grips with is that the media, more often than not, reflects public opinion rather than shapes it. We’ve got to understand that what we have in the Middle East is a market-driven phenomenon in the media-driven arena in ways that we never had before. In the past it used to be that governments used to monopolize the media. Today, that no longer is the case.

The reality is that people have access to many different channels across borders, and people can turn off the channels they don’t like, including their governments. In fact, polls show that most people in the Arab world today get their news from sources outside their own governments. Governments have less of an impact. What we have to understand is that when the new stations like Al Jazeera, the satellite stations, think about what to put on the air, they try to appeal to the largest possible market they can get in the Arab world. Arabic is one language understood across all the borders. When they ask the question “How do I appeal to that market?” they understand one thing that we should also understand: in times of pain, like what we’ve been experiencing in relation to the Middle East in the past few years, people listen with their hearts, not with their minds. Those who understand that are those who capture a bigger share of the market.

Al Jazeera, which is now being blamed for being anti-American and inciting violence and hate, was in fact, in the late 1990s, accused by people in the Arab world of being a Zionist agent, an Israeli agent, an American agent. Why? Because we had a peace process that seemed to be working, and people were expecting that suddenly, by the end of the decade, Israel and Arabs were going to live in peace. Whether they liked it or not, that was a fact. People in Riyadh didn’t know much about the Israelis; people in Rabat didn’t know much about the Israelis. Al Jazeera was bringing that home. It was the first one to put an Israeli voice from the Knesset, an Israeli voice from Tel Aviv, into every home. For that reason, people were accusing them of normalizing Israel in Arab eyes, which was, of course, what it did.

Still, it got a large audience, and the reason it got a large audience is because the public wanted to learn about Israel at a time of peacemaking. Immediately after the collapse of negotiations, you had the intifada and you had violence and bloodshed, and then you had pain—pain for the Arabs, pain for the Israelis—and people wanted to watch that pain. Al Jazeera was forced to cover more and more of it, and when they didn’t, as on the eve of the Iraq war, people turned to those stations that would put more on television, like Hezbollah’s Al Manar. It is being driven by market consumers.

Now I happen to think that is good. I happen to think that while putting violence in the air often is problematic and inciting, and we have to do it with a lot of responsibility, it is also irresponsible not to put it on the air. War should not be so insulated from our people, and it shouldn’t be insulated from their people. War is horrible, death is horrible, destruction is horrible, but it has to be part of our debate. Our debate should be determined in our public discourse, not on television, but television has to be a factor that helps us to make the right choices in those debates.