News That Travels Well

January 13, 2003
By JIHAD FAKHREDDINE






DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
Reports of Arab animosity toward the United States are a
mainstay of American television and newspapers. Arabs hate
us, Americans tell themselves, because they don't know us,
because their governments won't allow American voices to
reach the Arabs in the street.

Washington is working on several efforts to circumvent what
it perceives as Arab government censors and provide the
Arab public with direct access to American programming. The
White House and Congress are considering creating a new
satellite TV channel to reach the Arab states.

This new channel would complement the Washington-financed
Radio Sawa, which in March started broadcasting a mix of
Arab and Western music intended for young people, along
with an hourly dose of news from the official Washington
perspective. There is even a former advertising executive
running a State Department campaign to "sell" America to
Arabs through print and television advertising, photography
exhibitions and videos.

But in contrast to what Washington thinks, Arabs' access to
news from the West is constantly becoming more free. Radio
Sawa itself, for example, is transmitted through FM and AM
frequencies in many Arab cities. Most significant, because
it is carried by the state-owned Nilesat and Arabsat
satellites, Radio Sawa can reach approximately one-third of
the homes in Saudi Arabia and 10 percent of all households
in Egypt.

Radio Sawa is just one example of the many ways the Arab
world, specifically in Saudi Arabia, has opened up to
American sources of information. The process began in 1991
during the Persian Gulf war, when Arabsat brought CNN to
Arab homes, unedited, providing Arabs with their first
taste of satellite broadcasting. Today, CNN International
can reach close to 85 percent of homes in the gulf region.
Although CNN has not yet found it economically feasible to
have Arabic programming, the company did begin
CNNArabic.com last year.

Arabs have ever-increasing access to Western newspapers and
magazines as well. Newsweek introduced an Arabic edition in
2000. Equally significant is the cooperation between a
Lebanese newspaper, The Daily Star, and The International
Herald Tribune, which appears as part of The Star.

Saudi Arabia has taken the biggest steps in the Arab world
toward opening up to the American press. What reaches the
Arab masses through CNN, Newsweek, The Herald Tribune and
Radio Sawa is only a trickle compared to the American
content in Al Sharq Al Awsat, one of the most widely read
newspapers in the Saudi kingdom. Al Sharq Al Awsat, which
is edited in London and circulated in all Arab countries,
carries daily reports, news analysis and opinion columns
from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los
Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor.

Most of the major news reports that appeared in Al Sharq Al
Awsat in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and during
the war in Afghanistan were taken from these four American
publications. A typical copy of the newspaper will have
Thomas L. Friedman and William Safire alongside Arab
columnists, as well as editorials from The New York Times -
including one not long ago claiming that millions of Arab
youths yearn for democracy as promised by the United
States.

Other Arabic newspapers publish articles from the United
States. Al Ittihad, a government-owned newspaper in the
United Arab Emirates, runs at least two analytical articles
a day from major American newspapers. In commemoration of
the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Ittihad serialized the book
"Report From Ground Zero" by Dennis Smith, which chronicles
the horrors of terrorism.

Perhaps the most striking example of the pro-Western trend
in the Arab news media appeared in Al Hayat, the second
largest pan-Arab newspaper, which is published by Prince
Khalid ibn Sultan of Saudi Arabia. In his Sept. 3 column,
Jihad el-Khazen, the former editor in chief, wrote of The
New York Times: "I do not even remember a day where I
encountered what I could oppose in its coverage of the
first or the second intifada (equally so with respect to
The Washington Post)."

While Mr. Khazen's opinion might not be that of the
majority of Arabs, it is true that he represents a growing
Arab acceptance of American news - a positive development
that has not been recognized by the United States
government or most Arab scholars in the West.


Jihad Fakhreddine is the research manager for media at the
Pan-Arab Research Center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/opinion/13JIHA.html?ex=1043512471&ei=1&en=d35e59fbcd2b041c