Keynote Address

Jonathan Wright's Keynote Address: The Middle East and the Media – Persistent Flaws and the Possibilities for Change

When I first heard I would speak to this conference on the Middle East and the media, I went back to a book I hadn't opened in years. It sat with yellowing pages on a distant bookshelf. Edward Said, the great Palestinian theorist of Orientalism, wrote Covering Islam in 1981 after the revolution in Iran. A quick browse shows the book was remarkably prescient. Some things have not much changed. Take the last sentences of the book: “If the history of knowledge about Islam in the West has been too closely tied to conquest and domination, the time has come for those ties to be severed completely. About this one cannot be too emphatic. For otherwise we will not only face protracted tension and perhaps even war, but we will offer the Muslim world ...the prospect of many wars, unimaginable suffering, and disastrous upheavals, not the least of which would be the birth of an 'Islam' fully ready to play the role prepared for it by reaction, orthodoxy, and desperation. By even the most sanguine of standards, this is not a pleasant possibility.” Said's prediction has been more or less fulfilled. His diagnosis of the role of knowledge is strongly stated, of course, and it's hard to assess how much the Western media have in fact contributed to those disastrous upheavals he predicted, but it's no secret that many accuse them of negligence or complicity. We only have to examine the performance of those media in 2002 and 2003 – when venerable media names, advertently or inadvertently, helped Western governments prepare public opinion for the venture of invading Iraq. There have been post mortems and some introspection, but nothing dramatic has changed to stop that happening again.

It's hard to exaggerate the role of the media in shaping perceptions of faraway places, especially areas of conflict such as the Middle East. Consider how people living in the United States or Europe might acquire knowledge of the Arab world. Unless they have a special interest in the subject, they pick up images and scraps of information from school, from films, perhaps from chance references in novels, occasionally but rarely from personal contact with Arab immigrants, but lastly and most intensively from what they see on television and read in newspapers and magazines. Coverage of the Middle East is often sparse and sporadic in widely circulated Western media, and often it takes the form of domestic news with an international dimension. In Britain last summer, for example, for weeks on end most domestic television coverage of the conflict in Afghanistan was about British soldiers, with tributes to the dead and visits to their homes. When there was coverage of the conflict on the ground it was usually military analysts discussing the various options open to NATO forces.

Opponents of the military campaign, about half of the British people, were kept to the margins. During the invasion of Iraq I recall watching day after day of CNN and Fox News coverage and wandering where the Iraqis had gone.

Precious few Iraqis appeared on the screen, except as dots in the distance. Reporters raced through the desert in armoured vehicles, stepping out from time to time to tell their audiences how 'we' were doing against 'them'. Media and authority had coalesced. The extent and the quality of media coverage does matter. It feeds directly into public policies which can spell life or death. An uninformed or misinformed public can go along with policies detrimental to their own interests and the interests of countless millions of others. A wellinformed public, on the other hand, can act as a brake on governments trying to mislead.

So what are the specific flaws in the way the Western and Arab media report across cultures? At the top of the list must come 'essentialism', a natural impulse for outsiders trying to describe another society or civilization.

Essentialists believe there is some tangible and immutable essence to Islam, or Christianity, or to Arab society and culture, or any other such construct. It is the bane of good reporting. Journalism has fallen behind the academic world in this respect.

Anthropologists and political scientists contest interpretations based on cultural or ideological determinism, but journalists still have no problem suggesting the Middle East is historically prone to conflict, that Arab society is frozen in ancient family and tribal models, or that Muslims are in some sense hostile to modernity, however modernity might be construed. Essentialism is a form of stereotyping. It provides ready answers, neat summations, apparently useful insights for the audience back home. But it blinds the reporter to the possibilities of internal change, of constructive interaction with the outside world. It makes unwarranted assumptions about the level of conformity among Arabs and Muslims. It judges Arab and Muslim individuals on how far they conform or diverge from some spurious Platonic ideal of Arabness or Muslimness or Westernization. I believe those essences are myths and we should all abandon the search for them. The alternative is messy and arduous.

Journalists have to sift through a mass of data about the real world, asking individual people how they see the world, what their aspirations are and what are their grievances. But that is what working journalists often do well.

Another fraught area for Western journalism, especially in recent times, has been 'embedding' in its widest sense – the way journalists have often become dependent for their physical safety on the armed forces and governments of their own nation-states. When I started covering the Middle East, we were free to speak to all sides in a conflict. We were people at least disengaged, if not always impartial, and we could visit front lines and sometimes cross those lines to the other side with few restrictions. That began to change when the United States intervened in the Lebanese conflict, and reporters became targets for kidnappers. Now the change has gone even further – European and American governments, by alienating so many Arabs and Muslims, have inadvertently compromised all their own citizens, forcing them to seek military protection in many areas. George Bush's famous adage – you are either with us or against us – has come home to roost.

The loss for journalism has been tragic. As Western armies take on a silent and mysterious, almost amorphous enemy, the camp followers who are journalists have lost the chance to tell the other side of the story. And it goes beyond military operations. Declaring themselves at war, Western governments have persuaded many journalists to join the war effort, in one way or another. At least as much as ever in the past, the perceptions and interests of Western governments cast a long shadow over Western reporting of the Middle East They set the agenda, frame the participants and try to exclude policy options they do not favour. Remember the famous Arab Spring of 2005, when people in Washington drew links between a few token gestures by disparate Arab governments and the media wrote tens of thousands of words on how change was in the air, until a few brave souls dared to say the Emperor had no clothes. The influence of governments and lobbyists is especially evident in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where the stakes are high and every word is scrutinized. Here we see a contrast and conflict between Western reporters in the field, who often try to be fair and honest, and their editors and stay-at-home commentators, whose vision of the Middle East owes much to government briefings and thinktank presentations. It's no accident that bloggers who contest that vision adopted the slogan '"proud member of the reality-based community". Take for example the way most U.S. and European media have summed up the outcome of the Camp David peace talks in the year 2000.

Setting aside much evidence available from the participants themselves, they generally cite as fact the contested US/Israeli version of events. These things matter. They become memes that dwell in the minds of readers and viewers, colouring their view of the conflict for years to come.

Single words matter too, and I'm pleased to see that one of the sessions at this conference will take them on. It's not just the usual culprits – terrorists, jihad and so on. Should we, for example, describe as 'moderate' those Arab governments deemed friendly to the West? On the surface the word looks harmless enough. But the label does privilege one aspect of those governments' policies, their attitude to the West, an attitude of cooperation and compliance rather than confrontation. Looked at from the inside, in countries with brutal police and without the rule of law, the label starts to lose its meaning. Arab news organizations have their own 'word' debates, over martyrdom and resistance, for example, but interestingly these are usually about events within the Arab world, less so labels about the West. Some media outlets, and I suspect the vast majority, seek the path of least resistance between the many pressures.

Inevitably the powerful and the vocal have more influence than the weak and the silent. In effect, these organisations go with the flow, in tune with the conventional wisdom, seeking safety in numbers. Some, on the other hand, have taken a mechanistic approach, balancing stories deemed favourable to one side with stories deemed favourable to the other. An Israeli funeral against a Palestinian funeral, a massacre of Shi'ites against a massacre of Sunnis. Arab news organizations go through the same process in much the same way. Those strategies will continue, because that's how institutions handle disagreement.

But the journalists in the field have more freedom, and they must use it. Reporters, often working alone, can weigh the evidence, use their judgment and experience of life, and cast a verdict. They cast their verdict when they decide how much weight to give to each of their sources, according to their credibility. 'Objectivity' is a big word, because the truth is usually too elusive to nail on the head. Often all the reporter has in hand is some fragments of a whole that hardly add up to anything coherent. But when the picture is clearer, journalists who are not automata or stenographers have in the end to use their judgment, and then be prepared to defend their conclusions.

That brings us to the question of individual reporters and their training and preparation. News organisations tend to field reporters who are quick on their feet, resourceful, with an eye for the angle which will make the story compelling. No television station is going to send a professor of Middle East Studies on a reporting assignment to Iraq solely on the basis of his knowledge. No mainstream newspaper is going to publish a paper which explains, for example, how tribal affiliations in Iraq have evolved under the impact of Ottoman, British and Baathist governments. But journalists cannot divorce themselves from the academic community and intellectual pursuits. Without such awareness, journalists end up reinforcing stereotypes, contributing to a vicious circle of misrepresentation. They need to read historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists. They need to stay abreast of alternative approaches and interpretations of events. In short, they need to open their minds. They also need a measure of 'empathy'. Instead of asking 'Why can't these people be more like us?' they need to make a mental leap, put themselves in the place of others and think how experiences and constraints affect the lives we all lead. They need to abandon the widespread assumption that all societies must follow the same path to some ideal future – that End of History which will come about only with the extinction of humanity. Language skills are vital too.

In a noisy world where we are bombarded with speeches, talk shows, feature films, trendy novels, slogans on billboards, and televised interviews with powerful people, a working journalist cannot afford to depend on secondhand versions. Luckily, and this is one bright spot, the pool of Arabic-speaking journalists who write well in English has grown exponentially in the last 30 years.

The Arab media have many problems – a shortage of resources, too much government control and interference, social and political taboos, but when it comes to coverage of the West, the picture is much rosier. For a start Europe and North America impinge on the minds of Arabs in a way that just does not happen in reverse. Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and the many Arabic-speaking television channels run by Western governments cover the West with an intensity that Western audiences probably never imagine. Speeches by U.S. presidents run in full with instantaneous translation, their representatives constantly have their say in debates. The Arab press often translates and prints in full editorials and opinion pieces from the major Western newspapers. Arabs have been watching Hollywood movies for decades in a way that Americans have never watched films by Youssef Chahine or Elie Suleiman. Bootleg translations of the memoirs of U.S. presidents and politicians sell on the pavements of Cairo. A byproduct of that interaction is that much of the phraseology generated in the West has already infiltrated Arab discourse. The expression 'Middle East' should make no sense to someone looking at the world from Cairo or Baghdad, But the phrase, invented by an American theorist of geostrategy, is now the title of a well known Arabic-language newspaper. A whole vocabulary related to geostrategic power – 'the war on terror', 'democratic reform', 'confidence-building measures' and so on – has shaped Arab perceptions in a way that has not really happened in reverse. The Arab and Western media now share many assumptions, and that was inevitable, given the imbalance of economic and technological power. But Arab journalists should also think carefully about the words they use and how they generalize about their own Other in the West. Arab media have sometimes fallen short, in a mirror image of their European and North American counterparts, in assuming the existence of some Western monolith, dead set on plunder and domination.

They make stereotypical generalizations about Western society, as materialistic, xenophobic and hypocritical, for example. These views persist, but mainly on the fringes. President Obama has helped to dispel them, through words if not yet deeds. The trouble with such views is that they overlook the diverse strands in Western culture, which includes many receptive to the views of others. Just like their counterparts in reverse, Arab journalists also need to look closely at the internal debates in the West and the complex elements that go into policymaking. I have spoken mainly about journalism but media today goes much wider than that. We have so many bloggers, some of them famous in their fields, opinion-makers in their own right. We have citizen reporters who tell the world what they see in the streets and post images on the Internet as fast as any journalist. We also have vocal racists and propagandists, White Supremacists and intolerant Islamists, throwing their opinions into the mix. Ideally, professional reporters on both sides should act as a benchmark in all those conflicts, using timeless virtues such as accuracy, clarity and good judgment.

Those working in an alien culture also need language skills, a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to listen. Hopefully, thus prepared, they will find that humans are fascinating for their diversity, but also surprising for the things they share.