COMMENTARY A new weapon in the
'war of ideas' By Ehsan Ahrari
A global war of ideas is set to begin and
Anglo-American dominance of international TV news
about to end. Arab and Muslim perspectives will
get wider play after Al-Jazeera introduces a
global television channel that will telecast news
in English.
Al-Jazeera International is to
go on air by mid-2006, beamed from its
headquarters in the Qatari capital Doha, with
regional broadcast centers in London, Washington
and Kuala Lumpur.
When Al-Jazeera was
established in 1996, no one had even heard
the
phrase "war of ideas" in the context of the world
of Islam. It was established to give the Arab
world Arab perspectives on major global issues.
That idea became quite profound in the aftermath
of the terrorist attacks in the United States on
September 11, 2001.
A lot has been written
in the post-September 11 era on the war of ideas.
However, a big chunk of it has been created in the
US. Now this war will acquire a global dimension,
with Al-Jazeera establishing a global
"battlefield" of ideas.
When the Bush
administration went into Afghanistan, it got a
taste of how an Arab information medium,
Al-Jazeera, would spin the coverage of the battle
in that country. It did not like the coverage,
which was instantly dubbed "anti-American",
"heavily biased", and even "pro-Taliban or
al-Qaeda".
Everyone likes to talk about
the globalization of the information revolution,
but that revolution has been slow in coming to
news coverage, especially the television version.
The world thus far has been under the oligopoly of
the British Broadcasting Corp and the Cable News
Network in terms of international coverage of
news.
According to the German magazine Der
Spiegel, BBC World reaches 279 million households
in 200 countries, while CNN International reaches
200 million households in 200 countries.
Al-Jazeera International, to be funded initially
by the Qatari government, expects to reach 30
million to 40 million households around the world
on its launch day.
The monopoly
English-language news coverage from the United
States and the United Kingdom has provided an
inordinate amount of leverage in news selection
and, more important, in propagating government
spin on issues of global import and interest.
The standard line underlying the coverage
of news in the US and the UK is that it is free
from the control of government. That is certainly
true. However, governments in both countries have
a huge say in what news items are covered and how
much time is allotted to them daily, because when
governments hold hearings, conferences and issues
analyses, those news channels are forced to cover
them because it is news.
Consequently,
long presidential or prime-ministerial news
conferences or lengthy coverage of major news
events present the US and British perspectives to
the American and British and even world audiences.
But the foreign perspectives on those very same
events are offered on a summarized basis. What is
also not stated is the inordinate amount of tilt
that is wittingly or unwittingly provided for the
US or UK perspectives, simply by covering them so
extensively. That automatically creates a bias in
the reporting of news.
In the coverage of
news, the notion of objectivity requires that the
views of both sides be presented. However, by
presenting "both" sides of a story, there is still
ample room for editorializing by the journalist
who is covering the story. Besides, being in the
US or British news media, there is a natural
inclination to be sympathetic to your own
country's perspectives. That is a human
predilection.
That reality was never
clearer than it has been since September 11, and
especially during the US invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. The US Department of Defense required
that journalists should be "embedded", which
became a euphemism for attaching them to various
military units and making sure they didn't talk
about things that would jeopardize military
operations. At least on surface, that is a
reasonable rule, but the military used it to
present predominantly the US perspectives during
both wars.
The controversial aspect of
that entire issue was that Al-Jazeera journalists
could not be forced to abide by those rules in
Afghanistan, at least until the dismantlement of
Taliban rule. However, during the Iraq campaign,
especially after the toppling of the regime of
Saddam Hussein, the Al-Jazeera coverage could not
remain that independent.
One correspondent
from Al-Jazeera made an interesting observation
about the Bush administration's decision to embed
journalists. By doing so, the US military provided
reporters good coverage from the front side of a
military operation, but never from its back side,
he said. What he was saying was that the frontal
coverage never presents viewers the destruction,
blood and gore related to war that the back-side
coverage of it does.
In embedding the
journalists with military units, the US military
could also ensure that the US version of what was
transpiring could be provided not only to the
American but to the global audience. Al-Jazeera
changed all that, if not that much from the
military theaters, certainly from a wider angle
inside Afghanistan and Iraq.
From the
perspectives of the Bush administration, the most
troubling part of Al-Jazeera's coverage was that
the US audience became increasingly aware of the
"anti-American bias" of that channel, and how much
US officials felt constrained and frustrated about
not being able to counter it. The only difference
was that most Americans did not get Al-Jazeera
coverage first-hand. Now they are about to get
that coverage in their living rooms. Consequently,
the international coverage of battlefields will
unquestionably undergo profound changes.
Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya, another Arab
channel, were determined to provide the Arab and
Muslim perspectives on the news. So the coverage
of the intifada (uprising) that started in
September 2000 was done with a keen interest in
underscoring the Palestinian suffering. Al-Jazeera
seems to have a corner in terms of getting the
propaganda tapes from al-Qaeda. At first, it
televised those tapes in their entirety. However,
under severe US criticism that Osama bin Laden
might be sending secret messages, Al-Jazeera
decided to air summaries of the tapes.
Meanwhile, there's likely to be a global
Islamic channel in the near future from Saudi
Arabia, Malaysia or Indonesia. Such a channel
would couch the entire debate of the war of ideas
in the Islamic context, as opposed to Al-Jazeera,
which will maintain its Arab slant on the news.
Now there is ample reason to feel
optimistic that the Arab and Muslim audiences will
have an opportunity to compare daily news,
perspectives and slants from the East as well as
the West. Through such comparisons they should
learn a lot about how much substance there is when
the US says it has no quarrel with Islam. By the
same token, they would be exposed to inadequacies
of the tyrannies under which they have been
living. Such a visualization on a daily basis is
likely, in the not-too-distant future, to bring an
end to those systems that should have been thrown
into the dustbin of history decades ago.
The globalization of the war of ideas
would pose the same type of challenges to the
United States as the onslaught of democracy in a
non-democratic polity. The US will have to compete
hard on a global scale to promote its own version
of reality and truth. Now the war of ideas will be
truly democratic in the sense that there is likely
to be an open competition between those who are
packaging their information well but lying and
those who are telling the truth, which might be
ugly though still reflecting reality.
Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO of
Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based
defense consultancy. He can be reached at
eahrari@cox.net or
stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear
regularly in Asia Times Online. His website:
www.ehsanahrari.com.
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