Journos dissect war coverage

2003-10-08 14:46

Dubai - Far from the mean streets of Baghdad, in a swank beachfront hotel dubbed "the ultimate Arabian experience,", hundreds of Arab and western media heavyweights locked horns this week in their own gulf war.

But the gulf stayed wide as press barons and hacks, in suits and dishdasha robes, traded charges over coverage of the US invasion of Iraq and haggled over visions of a "responsible" media versus the cowboy "if it bleeds, it leads".

"This was supposed to be a meeting of the minds. Instead it's like a tennis match," lamented Janine Di Giovanni, a Times of London correspondent who covered Iraq and sat on a panel analysing the performance of western journalists.

The Arab Media Summit was aimed at finding common ground between the two worlds after the US-led war, which confirmed the emergence of groups such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya television as powerful regional voices.

Western media behemoths

But the gathering on Tuesday and Wednesday only highlighted stereotypes of a controlled and timorous Arab press belittled by western media behemoths that preach objectivity but promote the agenda of an aggressive US government.

"I would like to ask western journalists, and especially the Americans, to stop giving us lessons in freedom of the press," complained Hamdi Qandeel, an Egyptian TV presenter.

"Our crisis is authority - whether it be Arab authority or American authority," he said to thunderous applause in the plush conference hall of the Madinat Jumeirah Resort.

Azmi Bishara, a writer and politician from the Palestinian town of Nazareth, dismissed notions of a wickedly totalitarian press in the Middle East.

"Nobody believes the Arab media. It is not dangerous at all," Bishara said. "I don't believe that this is as dangerous as a media that believes it is a free media and objective."

Arab journalists also roundly criticised what they felt was blatant pro-American "boosterism" of the western press covering the Iraq war and the demonisation of all Muslims after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

But veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett judged the western media was covering Iraq "adequately" and said the challenge for the Arabs "is in presenting the Iraqi story in a way that hopefully will be beneficial to the Iraqi people".

Labels and cliché

The westerners also retorted with some grievances of their own.

"How much do you try to understand the many shades of western opinion?" barked Tim Sebastian, the tough-nosed interviewer of the BBC's Hard Talk programme. "How far do you get past the labels and cliché?"

But when Sebastian accused a fellow panellist of being "selective" in his judgments about the western media, he was challenged sharply from the audience by Nima Abu-wardeh, of Dubai TV.

Noting the Briton had spoken of mass killings under Saddam Hussein, Abu-wardeh wondered why he had not mentioned more than one million Iraqis whose deaths were attributed to UN sanctions. "This is being conveniently selective," she said.

Not all the barbs were cross-cultural.

Failure to blow whistle

Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan, minister of culture for the United Arab Emirates, delivered a scathing keynote address that blasted the Arab media for failing to blow the whistle on Saddam's iniquities before the war.

And Danny Schechter, an American media writer who said he was "self-embedded" in front of his television set during the war, warned the US media to take a long look and heal itself.

"There is more in the United States than CNN," Schechter said. "The question we have to ask ourselves is why certain truths died in this war, including the idea of a free and independent media."

One of the few things the conference could agree on was that, whether it was used for good or ill, the media was a powerful tool.

One panel discussion was titled "the ultimate weapon of mass destruction" and Chris Cramer, managing director of CNN International, likened the flow of information to the rapid spread of Sars.

"However, unlike Sars, journalism can't be quarantined," Cramer said.

The gathering also acknowledged that talk was cheap, although perhaps less so in such posh surroundings. Indeed, Bishara of Nazareth got the biggest rise when he cut himself off in the middle of a rambling discourse on mass media and metaphors.

"I don't have a point to make here," he said. "I just came to see my friends."

Sapa-AFP

- AFP