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MR. HAFEZ AL-MIRAZI
Washington Bureau Chief, Al-Jazeera Television
PLENARY SESSION IV
“American Media and Foreign News Coverage”
Thank you for the introduction and thank you for inviting me here. I am actually at a disadvantage coming after Mr.O’Sullivan. He had prepared a statement. I don’t have that. He has wonderful English, which I don’t have. English is my second language, so bear with me. Although when I heard that Dr. Henry Kissinger might be here at this conference I felt a bit relieved because, I said to myself, if they can understand Kissinger’s accent I shouldn’t have a problem.
Anyway, I will try to explain the topic of discussion here. I am supposed to give a foreign perspective of American media coverage after 9/11 and the subsequent changes. It is a little ironic. I have actually been in Washington since 1983, more years than I have spent in any other city in the world, including my hometown in Egypt. I spent more years at Voice of America, run by the federal government, than I’ve spent in any other media outlet that I’ve worked for, whether BBC or Al-Jazeera, which I joined two years ago, or even at the Voice of the Arabs at Cairo Radio before.
Yet I think all this experience might allow me to make some comparisons between how Al-Jazeera covered some of the events of 9/11 and how the American media covered them.We also have to remember that we tend to lump everything into one word “the American media” as if it were a monolithic entity, but it is not. We have to distinguish, at least from an Arab-American perspective, between print media and electronic media. And if we are going to rate the performance of the American media, we’d say that the electronic media gets the lower grades and the print media higher grades.
Furthermore, in the print media we have to distinguish between news coverage and the editorial pages. In my opinion, the editorial pages always, or most of the time, represent the worst kind of journalism that you can read. People write for you regardless of the fact that the Cold War is over, or even the Crusades are over. Some of them still seem to live in the era of the Crusades, let alone the Cold War. Unfortunately, when these kinds of articles and abrasive pieces—sometimes by prominent names—are translated or quoted in the Arab and Muslim world, the reaction there is one that has become familiar to us here, “Why do they hate us?” So this is a question that you actually hear on both sides sometimes, but it isn’t the question that should be addressed, as I will explain later.
I had spent enough years in Washington to at least explain to our Al-Jazeera viewers what President Bush meant when he used the word crusade to describe, a few days after the September 11 attacks, the war or the campaign he was going to launch against terrorism. Immediately, people in the Arab world jumped on the word crusade and said, “Here he is actually confirming what bin Laden was saying, namely, that this is an American crusade, a Western crusade, against all Muslims.” In a brief commentary on Al-Jazeera after Bush’s speech, I at least tried to explain that in the American context you talk about a “crusade” against AIDS, a “crusade” against cancer, and that it means a struggle or an all-out effort against something. Ironically, if you want a typical word to replace crusade in Arabic, it would be jihad, from the verb jahada, to strive, make an effort.
In its militaristic sense, you can talk about a conquest or a military jihad, and this is the meaning that is unfortunately most prevalent in the American press. But the meaning of jihad is much broader. There is an apt quote from the Prophet Muhammad. After coming back from a military campaign, he said to his companions that they had returned from the “minor jihad” to the “big jihad.” His followers wondered what he meant by “minor jihad” after all they had gone through in the military campaign. He said, “It is the struggle with your self.” So jihad is your own personal struggle to gain self-control, for your moral betterment. Unfortunately, when Yasser Arafat uses the word jihad, the American media jump on it and keep repeating the word, with all its bad connotations. In the same way, however, we find the Arab media distorting Bush’s use of the word crusade, trying to claim that he means crusade in the negative sense. We all know about the massacres of innocent people during the Middle Ages, the blood coming up to the ankles in the conquest of Jerusalem, and all the acts that even the Vatican apologized for. So clearly we have a problem of perception and image, and of how to interpret cultures in an accurate manner.
Unfortunately, the most constructive question asked after September 11 was only addressed for a few days: “Why did it happen to us?” People started the process of explaining and finding answers, not justifications. If you want a more precise version, it would be, “Why did they hate us?” And “they” here means the hijackers, the people who carried out the criminal acts of 9/11.Why did they hate us so much that they would sacrifice their own lives to wreak so much havoc on civilians?
But the question “Why do they hate us?” also misses the point. It misleads us, instead of leading to an enlightened discussion, because once you are talking about hatred, you are not talking about rational feelings for the most part. Talking about “they” and “us” is pretty much what we found in the political discussions and even government rhetoric post-9/11. We know that the day after President Bush uttered the word crusade, he visited the Islamic Center in Washington, becoming the first U.S. current president in history to visit a mosque.Even so, the language that has been used since then has not helped and it tends to exacerbate rather than solve the problems of 9/11. Bush talks about “we” and “them,” good and evil, “You are either with us or against us.” And “you have to make a decision.” These kinds of dichotomies were supposed to be over with the end of the Cold War, or even during the Cold War. At that time, people at least had a kind of middle ground and could call themselves the nonaligned movement, for example. After 9/11 you were either “with us or with the terrorists.”
In the U.S. electronic media’s coverage of 9/11 we saw the American flag waving on TV screens, something that we didn’t see in the Gulf War of 1991. Some people attributed this to competition between Fox News and CNN, with each one imitating the other or trying to prove they were more loyal than the other. You also saw the networks using the word “we” a lot. At the very least, in Al-Jazeera’s coverage, whether of Iraq issues or the Palestinian intifada or any other issue, we have never used the word “we.” This is something that we need to discuss also. When you are covering news and keep saying “we,” e.g. we moved to this position or that one in Afghanistan, the line between being a journalist and being someone speaking on behalf of the government becomes blurred. My understanding is that if you are covering events you have to be neutral. In Al-Jazeera’s coverage, everybody is identified by his own title and nationality, whether it’s the emir of Qatar, the Palestinian president, or the U.S.president. You don’t say “we.”
In order to better understand Al-Jazeera’s coverage before and after 9/11, I’d like to give you a little background—especially for those of you who have only heard of Al-Jazeera in a negative context.“Al-Jazeera” in Arabic means “the island.” It was established in 1996 based on a field experiment, a joint venture, between the BBC Radio World Service and another Arab satellite television called Orbit, a Saudi-owned television station. They teamed together in 1994 to form the BBC Arabic Service, in which the BBC would have editorial control and the Arabic satellite company would give them one band and support them financially, but the two would join together in producing something with editorial integrity and with respect for the audience. The people involved thus got used to neutrality and to the integrity of news reporting at the BBC radio service.
The venture didn’t last more than eight months because whoever was financing the project on the Arab side couldn’t quite put up with the BBC having editorial control. There was an interview with a Saudi dissident and various other things that the Saudis didn’t like. So at the end of eight months you had 250 staffers, very professional veterans of the BBC and other international media, out of jobs. Then came a change in the government in Qatar. The new emir had some ideas about freedom of speech, modernization, and democratization for his country. So they suggested establishing a channel called Al-Jazeera. Instead of basing it in London, Paris, or Washington so it could have some margin of freedom, they decided for the first time to try to have a relatively free independent media network based in an Arab capital. They established Al-Jazeera in 1996, modeled after the BBC, with the board of directors receiving public grants from the state of Qatar.
Al-Jazeera’s programming consists of talk shows similar to Crossfire’s format, news coverage, coverage of Arab affairs, both in the Arab Muslim world and the rest of the world. After only one or two years of operation, Al-Jazeera became the enemy of many Arab governments. We started to hear what we are hearing now, the term “anti-Americanism.” We started to hear Al-Jazeera being labeled anti-Saudi if it put out something critical of the Saudi government, by interviewing a Saudi dissident or opposition leader or offering an independent critique. The next day, Al-Jazeera is anti-Egyptian, anti-Moroccan, and anti-Algerian. I could name 22 Arab countries whose governments didn’t like what we were saying. At that time, the Israeli government was somehow happy with Al-Jazeera, so people started to call Al-Jazeera a front for the Israelis, a Zionist station operating under Arab names and with an Arabic facade.
Then came the second Palestinian uprising on this day exactly two years ago. Al-Jazeera started to cover the uprising, and people who liked us in Israel even allowed Al-Jazeera to be aired on some of the cable stations for the one million Arab Israelis, but then they started to call Al-Jazeera anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and incited people against us, even though many Israeli politicians gave us interviews and are still giving us interviews. Al-Jazeera is almost the only channel now that on a routine basis interviews Israeli officials. Before elections Ehud Barak was approaching day Al-Jazeera every other day for an interview. But when you cover something the Israeli government doesn’t like, it is the same; you are anti the whole country.
This kind of unnuanced criticism is understandable when it comes to government-controlled media in the Arab world or some of the Israeli publications that were aligned with the government in power at that time. But it is not understandable, at least to me, when I hear it from the supposedly free and independent American media. As soon as Al-Jazeera gives an alternative version of events or some balanced view of what is going on, it is immediately accused of being anti-American or a bin Laden channel. Why didn’t we call CNN Saddam Hussein’s chosen channel in 1991? The problem of aligning yourself with the government or the government’s adversaries is something that we witnessed in the media coverage in 1991.
The lesson of the Vietnam War was not only the Powell Doctrine, i.e., that you give the military complete power with no strings attached. Another lesson of the Vietnam War for the U.S. military establishment was that you have to win the war, media-wise or propaganda-wise, domestically before internationally. The result was that in the Gulf War we had a pool system in which people were escorted and told only what the establishment wanted to tell them and taken only to approved sites. That wasn’t the case in Vietnam, where U.S. correspondents had almost complete access. People didn’t believe the reporting about some of the massacres they reported, but later on they did believe them.
In 1991, we didn’t see any of the massacres. We never saw the mass graves of the Iraqi soldiers or anyone else. We never saw the details, at least on TV. We read about some in the media, about the “mile of death,” about people retreating out of Kuwait and being bombed, carpet-bombing most of the time, until some political officials were sickened and decided to stop the war. Not only for this reason, of course, but for strategic reasons, whether to balance what was left of the Iraqi power with the Iranian, or fear for the Saudis, or fear for the Turkish, but whatever, these were things we never saw.
Maybe if we had seen more, the whole issue of Iraq could have been solved on two levels. It could have been solved because the Iraqis and the Arabs would have seen Saddam as the kind of person who could do all this to his people, and it would have been very clear cut. And also Americans and the West would have seen what the government and its military machine did to those people who were taken hostage by a regime like Saddam’s. Maybe we could have prevented the sanctions and the stage that we’ve reached now, facing another Iraq war. I read yesterday in USA Today on the front page the headline “Waiting for the Lightning Action.” In the National Review the latest one is, “Let the Games Begin.” With this kind of trivializing discourse, what do you mean by a war? What do you mean by carpet-bombing against civilians?
I still remember watching with my kids here in Washington the CNN coverage of January 15, 1991. The famous anchors of CNN and other reporters in the Rashid Hotel described the bombing over Baghdad that night—at least Bernie Shaw did, if I remember correctly—as resembling Fourth of July fireworks. Hundred of thousands of terrified families, children and others in a city, with B-52s bombing them, and this is a Fourth of July! What would the reaction be if the Arab media called what happened in New York and Washington something very similar to Fourth of July fireworks?
So there is the issue of sensitivity, if I can sum up: sensitivity versus sensation. We have never seen the church that Timothy McVeigh attended on TV screens in America. We have never seen interviews with people who defended Timothy McVeigh. We have never even seen his name paired with his religion, as in the Christian Timothy McVeigh. And we shouldn’t see this. But when it comes to Arabs and Muslims, it is exactly like the chef in a restaurant who gives T-bone steaks to his favorite customers. The American media has given their editors-in-“chef” the special T word for specific customers. Terrorism as a T word is used only when it comes to Arabs and Muslims, preferably if they are foreigners. If you are Muslim but American, you might have a better chance. In the case of John Walker, he is the “American Taliban.” I don’t remember anyone calling John Walker a terrorist. Maybe some did, but not the majority, because he is a citizen. He looks like us. We have to examine carefully how we look at and describe others.
Terrorism, as Mr. O’Sullivan mentioned, is political violence, a political upheaval. In the history of mankind it wasn’t someone from Hamas or Al-Jihad who used the word or told people in the schools, “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is Patrick Henry who said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” And you don’t need people to be specialists in Islam (or pretend to be specialists in Islam when they are really Islam-bashers) to tell you about this religion or that culture. It is just like any other culture. The only problem is that you are deciding and reading about another culture or watching another culture in a time capsule.
If you need an explanation of what’s going on in the Arab and Muslim world now, you need only ask a U.S. historian to tell you that the Palestinian territories are going through a war of independence, with all the ugliness of a war of independence. That brings us back to the problem of bias in the coverage. It’s not a matter of people feeling supportive, or if the U.S. is too supportive of the Palestinians or too supportive of Israel. We need to review how the media is covering it.
With this in mind, about three months ago, after talking to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), I wanted to get some numbers. I went to Lexis-Nexis and put in the words “Jewish terrorist,” then “Arab terrorist.” Over four months, I wanted to see who used them more or how many times they were used in the major U.S. newspapers. I found that “Arab terrorist” had been used 1,500 times in the time that I selected. In the Israeli media it was something similar to that, maybe even less. But for “Jewish terrorist” I found 46 entries in the Israeli newspapers that are listed, while I found in the American media about 20. It was very strange to find in the Israeli media less biased coverage of what is going on in the Arab-Israeli conflict than you find in the American media.
As much as we have grievances and problems with the Arab media, I think there are also grievances and problems with the American media. And I would like to end by saying that perspective is the key word here. We use it sometimes to hide our bias, but there is bias. Someone once said, I don’t remember who, that the most objective person is the one who declares his subjectivity or bias from the very beginning.
With respect to Al-Jazeera’s covering news from an Arab and Muslim perspective after 9/11, I’d like to remind you of the following: Al-Jazeera broadcast President Bush’s live press conferences on a daily basis—five and six hours—and every two weeks when they got a tape from bin Laden or al-Qaeda, they aired it for 45 minutes. Why didn’t the administration talk about the 40 hours of Washington coverage?. For six weeks, just until last week, the American media was talking about a period of calm in the Palestinian areas, with no suicide attacks. Actually it wasn’t calm. Seventy-two Palestinians were killed during the so-called quiet time, including at least 10 or 12 children in their own apartments. But it was quiet because there were no Israeli victims.
Only last week, violence came back to the Middle East, because five or seven, unfortunately, were killed in suicide attacks that we all should be against. But we have to care about others, as we want others to care about us. For some of the people who were taped celebrating 9/11, their explanation was, “Let the Americans feel what it’s like when you have it in your own backyard, in your city, when you have your own kids killed. How does it feel? Maybe then you would sympathize with us and feel what we feel: the rage, the anger.” But I don’t think anybody said that the United States deserved it from a point of view that it is morally right.
The whole conspiracy theory that Mossad was behind 9/11 reflects the thinking that it was so bad that it couldn’t have been an Arab or a Muslim who did it. It must be Mossad; it must be someone else against us. I would like to pause here and urge caution against the words that the media uses. When Israel does something against the Palestinians or the American military uses something, you call it “retaliation.” It is not your job as journalists to decide what a retaliation is, what an action is, and what a reaction is. Once you do that, you are taking sides, and this is a problem. You say “America strikes back.” Strikes back against whom? Against the poor Afghan people? Are they striking back against specific members of al-Qaeda, the commanders, or was it carpet-bombing? When you say, “target Iraq,” what do you mean by “target Iraq”?
By examining these kinds of phrases that are pervasive and unquestioned in the American media, we can begin to develop a more self-critical and nuanced approach to media coverage. Thank you.
