Aljazeera
International:
The Plot Thickens
By Ramzy Baroud
17 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The launch of Aljazeera International
on November 15, the English arm of Aljazeera Satellite Television was
hardly an ordinary event. It was another notable addition to the growing
global efforts aimed at counterbalancing American-European domination
over world media: deciding on what story is to be told and how, thus
shaping public opinion, reinforcing Westerns policies, disseminating
its own ideas and ideals, at the expense of the almost entirely neglected
and utterly hapless audiences that neither relate nor wish to identify
with such discourses.
It’s still too early
of course, to appraise, in any serious fashion, academic or otherwise,
the performance of Aljazeera English, and whether it has lived up to
its own ideals and the expectations of its projected audience. However,
it must be said that the clash of discourses and the calls for a balanced
media is hardly new. This topic is in dire need of urgent and continual
discussion.
Clearly, the need for Aljazeera,
and subsequently its English service, came from the realization that
the presentation of events in Arab countries are far from fair in the
mainstream media in the US and elsewhere in the West.
Further, the public’s
opinion of these events are not only scarce, but bits and pieces that
they may perceive are often tainted.
But, how much does the average
person in the West know about the Middle East’s key conflict,
that between Israel and the Arabs, primarily the Palestinians? How much
of that knowledge is molded by the media, and how much by personal discovery
predicated on one’s own objective reasoning?
Answers may differ, but it
remains true that opinions formed regarding distant conflicts like that
of the Middle East tend to be homogeneous in nature, and for the most
part fail to deviate from the predominant media narrative espoused by
the mainstream.
Further, how much influence
do states have on their media, being mindful that ideally the media
should be completely divorced of the public sector, therefore being
an independent and unbiased critic? While states cannot prevent events
or guarantee absolute power for themselves, they've well learned of
the value of the media and its ability to forge a favourable climate
of public opinion that seems incidentally consistent with that of the
state.
Public opinion is molded
in the western mainstream media by consistently pressing particular
issues, while repressing others. For example, it is quite rare that
a routine attack by Israeli forces on the civilian population in Palestine
makes headline news, but a reaction to such an onslaught, such as a
suicide bombing would be the leading story and priority for news outlets
everywhere.
In doing so, public opinion
is slowly conditioned to think that Palestinian lives are not as significant
as Israeli lives, and that Palestinian attacks are far more frequent
and brutal. And while these policies are certainly mandated by the upper
echelons of any given media institution, they are effective in not only
tainting the publics view of events on the ground, but the reporters
who compile those facts as well. Such policies are intolerable and should
be recognized as racist policies, as they indeed are.
Another obvious example is
the Iraq war. The US media, and to a lesser degree the British media,
though they might allow for a controlled debate regarding the methods
and tactics used to win the war, seem in unison regarding the ‘admirable’
objectives of the war. The BBC hesitates little to use such assertions
often infused by Tony Blair such as ‘liberating’ Iraq, bringing
‘democracy’ to the Iraqis, and so forth. The margin allowed
by the BBC is whether the post-invasion period has allowed for a complete
liberation or whether full democracy is possible considering the civil
strife, thus hardly ever questioning the original sins, the unwarranted,
illegal invasion and subsequent occupation themselves. US media remain,
of course, the extreme example.
In Afghanistan, the picture
is equally tainted and dishonest. How often do we hear of a meaningful
debate about the true intention of the war on that poor, ruined country?
Almost never. Commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Afghanistan
invasion, CNN, the BBC, plus numerous media outlets in the West dispatched
their reporters to Kabul and various other Afghani towns to examine
the situation in that country after years of violent Taliban ‘resurgence’
and collation ‘reconstruction’ efforts. They examined the
plight of women, education, the health sector, security, drug trafficking,
etc. Some of the reports were astounding, indeed.
But such a selective examination
was clearly a wholehearted embrace of the US government’s claim
that its war on Afghanistan was motivated by such noble objectives as
freeing women from the grip of extremism, improving the plight of ordinary
Afghanis, etc. These objectives were only introduced when the original
ones failed, such as the capturing of Osama bin Laden, one that the
media had also touted in the early months of the war. It was conveniently
dropped by the media, when it was dropped by the military and as an
official priority by Western governments. Now, Western journalists freely
and often courageously challenge the failure of the NATO led coalition
in Afghanistan to improve the lives of the people as the situation there
is worsening and drug trafficking, mostly from Afghanistan to Iran to
Europe is at an all time high; but again, there are limits to this journalistic
audacity: only the likes of John Pilger still question the original
objectives of the war, which like Iraq, is also being lost.
It is important to remember
all of this, but equally important to truthfully examine the state of
the Arab media, especially with the advent of Aljazeera English, regardless
of how it wishes to define itself.
The many years of controlled
press in the Arab world has produced two equally alarming phenomena:
one restrictive that champions the viewpoint of the authority, and another
overtly impulsive that discounts the authority and offers itself as
the only viable alternative. Will Aljazeera be that third voice that
speaks truth to power, yet neither self-congratulating, nor reactionary?
Is that even possible, considering how Aljazeera is itself funded and
politically shielded? The debate is hardly meaningful if rashly examined.
It ought to be said however,
that without a serious challenge to the prevailing media control mechanism,
a reordering of media priorities and a re-examination of the relationship
between the media and the state, it’s most likely that media distortions
will continue to afflict the collective imagination of entire societies,
thus shaping their views of themselves, of the world around them, and
therefore prejudicing the way they define their views and responsibilities
toward global conflicts, whether in Palestine-Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan
or anywhere else.
Ramzy Baroud’s latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada:
A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press) is available
at Amazon.com and in the United States from the University of Michigan
Press.
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