Bridging the Gap

When the BBC played the Azan in the background of a documentary on violence, Muslims were offended although a British reporter of Middle East Affairs said it was unpremeditated. But when it stopped referring to Israel’s planned killings of Palestinians as ‘assassinations’ and started using ‘targeted killings’ instead, it was inevitable to call it intentional misreporting of Arab affairs.

Such misreporting of Arab affairs is also a blatant practice by the American media, according to some Western experts in Middle East Affairs.

“Just as the BBC last month ordered its reporters to use the phrase “targeted killings” for Israel’s assassination of Palestinians, CNN –under constant attack from right-wing Jewish lobby groups- has instructed its journalists to stop referring to Gilo (Bayt Gala) as a “Jewish settlement,” said Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper, the Independent. “They must call the settlement, built illegally on occupied Arab land outside Jerusalem, “a Jewish neighborhood”.”

The debate over Western media coverage of Middle East affairs has been the topic of several heated discussions since the September 11th events, the latest of which came in a session organized by Al-Ahram Regional Institute for Journalism in cooperation with the Religious News Service from the Arab World, RNSAW.

The session, Bridging the Divide: Arab image in Western media, was an episode of a six-week workshop titled 'Comparing Western and Egyptian perspectives in covering current affairs'.

Though the participants in the panel discussion accepted the assumption that there is misreporting of Arab affairs by Western media, they presented different perspectives of the causes and the solutions.

Intentional and unintentional misreporting:

Cornelis Hulsman, Ds., editor-in-chief of RANSAW and coordinator of the workshop, believes there are one-sided reports in the West about the Arab World and for the purpose of responding to those reports; the RANSAW was founded in 1997.

Hulsman recalled some distorted reports produced by the Middle East Media Research Institute in Washington (MEMRI). “Such reports are usually based on quotes and comments taken out of context. Responding to the deliberate biased reporting should be by giving facts away from emotional reactions,” he said.

Bad intentions are not always behind distorted reporting about the Arab world.

“Sometimes distortions give the impression they were done on purpose. I believe you have to be very careful presuming this. Too often bad intentions were presumed while in fact they were not”, he added.

Andrew Hammond, Reuters’ correspondent in Cairo, agreed with Hulsman that not all Western media are biased. “It depends on the type of media: wire service, television or print media. When talking about news agencies’ practices, they are closer to objectivity more than any other medium. But sometimes, as a news agency’s reporter, you have to report others’ comments as they are even if you do not believe or disagree with.”

Hammond said he interviewed a US Department of State’s representative at the US Embassy in Cairo and the comments he gave were neither acceptable nor true, but he had to put them in his story because it was his duty as a reporter.

Television and print media produce in-depth stories and have rooms for analysis and opinions, which might distort sometimes the image, as it is the case with the Palestinians. ‘There is a debate going on in the BBC about its pro-Israeli reporting,” Hammond said. “That is why we should not generalize by saying all Western media are biased.”

Why the image is distorted:

From a journalistic perspective, the Western media, according to Hammond, is interested in covering issues like women and Islam, violence and Islam, sex and Islam, the Arab-Israeli conflict, anti-Semitism, lack of democracy, human rights, circumcision and economic reform.

Unfortunately, the coverage of such issue helps distort the image of Arabs more because the West does not respect Arab countries for lack of democracy and for their continual denial of their problems, Hammond said.

“The West respects countries that admit their problems. Adding to this, good news coming from Egypt is quite few. Economic reform is slow and the political scene is still,” he added.

Abdel Menaem Saeed, PhD, head of Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, tackled the problem from a historical perspective.

“The issue of image has historical roots started with classifying Islam as an Eastern religion and Christianity as the religion of the West though both emerged and embraced in the East. Such classification suggested several clashes between the East and the West,” Saeed explained.

The gap was even widened by the Western media, which failed to truthfully report the Arab affairs. “The language bar contributes to the problem and I don’t mean just understanding the language, but the ‘soul’ of the language,” he said.

Quoting Bahgat Qurani, professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, Saeed said, “The image of the Arab in the Western media can be put in six Bs: the Bedouin, the belly dancer, the bazaar, the bomber and the backward.” “Along with such gloomy stereotyping of the Arab, there is a deliberate disregarding of the region’s good news.”

Egypt’s role in several international occasions and Arab contributions in human relief activities are not given proper coverage by the Western media, he said.

Disregarding the region’s good news and misreporting the Arab affairs especially the on-going Arab-Israeli conflict are not essentially intentional, V. Windfuhr, chairman of the Foreign Press Association and Correspondent of the German newspaper, Der Spiegel commented.

“Despite all books and publications issued about the region, still there is ignorance of basic facts about the area. A foreign correspondent of a prominent Western paper asked me once: Why Arafat wants Jerusalem? The question stunned me,” Windfuhr said.

Some journalists are sent to the region with no knowledge of the language and the culture. Their misreporting of the Arab affairs doesn’t reflect certain political attitudes, but it is the outcome of a different cultural and media environment they lived in, he explained.

Changing the Arab discourse…changing the Western stereotypes

Although uprooting long-lived stereotypes that have been reinforced by a serial of events since September 11th 2001 is not an easy problem to tackle in a single workshop where Western and Arab journalists exchanged their views, the panel discussion’s participants presented a number of solutions, each of which is worth studying.

While Windfuhr stressed the importance of having well-qualified journalists covering the Middle East Affairs, Hammond suggested solutions at two levels: the governmental and the non-governmental.

The Arab governments should be more frank and talk freely about their problems in order to gain the West’s respect and revamp their image in the Western media. At non-governmental level, the Arabs should give up talking about what should be done and what should not be and start taking actions.

“In Israel we find them keen to follow what is written about them in the Western media and keen to respond and pressurize the media to change whatever deemed anti-Israeli reporting. The Arabs should do the same,” Hammond said.

Both Hulsman and Saeed believed the solution should come from the Arab media. Changing the rough violent Arab discourse to a smooth dialogue will enable us to explain our points of view. “Imagine we have turned the sound off while watching Al Jazeera’s program ‘The Opposite Direction’. We will watch violent facial and body expressions which reflect the sort of discourse the Arabs have,” said Saeed.

Egyptian media articles are too emotional. Writers mix their own opinions with the obtained facts, a thing that is used against them by some Western media like the MEMRI. It is important for journalists to make a distinction between factual reporting and opinions to escape being misused, Hulsman concluded.

Yomna Kamel