Arab Media & Society

“There is the school that believes that news media should have an agenda and should work on that agenda for ideological and political reasons, which is Al Jazeera’s.  We are in the school that believes you need to guarantee knowledge with the flow of news without being biased and by being as much as possible balanced,” Khatib continued.

Just days into the conflict, in a linguistic play on the name of Al Arabiya, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the channel “Al Ibryia,” which roughly means The Hebrew One.  The resulting campaign against Al Arabiya, which Khatib believes Al Jazeera fed, has brought into the open long-simmering resentments between the two channels.

Al Jazeera was “satisfying the mob” and “led a campaign for Hamas,” Khatib told me.  “They chose to highlight the dead bodies and bloody scenes in close-up, thinking this will create shock.  We were cautious with this out of respecting our viewers and our code of ethics.”

Sitting in the newsroom of Abu Dhabi TV, Director of News Abdulraheem Al-Bateeh said that was all nonsense.  “Come on, it’s obvious.  Al Jazeera is showing that it is pro-Hamas and Al Arabiya shows that it is pro-Fatah.”  His channel, he insists, sits in the middle, in keeping with Emirati government policy.  “We are with Hamas on the humanitarian side, but politically we are with Fatah.”

But even in its most sanitized form, Arab coverage is a world away from that seen in the U.S.

Make no mistake, reporting by international news organizations was badly hampered by Israel’s refusal to allow journalists to cross into Gaza and Egypt’s own decision to keep its border with Gaza sealed.  But all news organizations were struggling under the same strictures.  That doesn’t explain the vivid contrast in coverage between the U.S. networks and those overseas.

And it’s not just Arab, or even European channels like the BBC, that provided coverage different from that seen in the U.S.  An American diplomat here in the Middle East told me that he and a colleague were working out in the embassy gym one day with the television on.  The embassy gets a feed from Armed Forces Radio and Television, so diplomats have access to CNN’s domestic service.  Out of curiosity, they started switching back and forth between CNN domestic and CNN international, the parallel – separately staffed and produced – version of the network seen outside the U.S.  “We couldn’t believe it,” he recalled.  The domestic CNN was dominated by commentary supporting Israeli actions, while the international feed was focused on the devastation on the ground.

Balance is the goal of any quality news organization.  But in the U.S., the quest for balance in this complex and highly-charged conflict has sometimes seemed contrived.

Take ABC anchor Charles Gibson’s lead-in to a “children of war” piece on the January 8 World News Tonight: “Youngsters on both sides of the border are being killed, injured and traumatized by the fighting in Gaza,” he reported.  But is that strictly true?  By the day the piece aired, according to UNICEF, 292 Palestinian children had been killed, with hundreds more wounded.  The number has since grown.  Of the three Israeli civilian deaths at that point, none were children.

Yet American viewers who watched the piece that followed Gibson’s lead-in could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that both sides were suffering equally and that, as in Gaza —a ten mile by six mile strip that is one of the most densely populated places on earth – there was nowhere in Israel where one could escape the torrent of missiles.  There is certainly no doubt that the last few weeks have been traumatic for Israeli children living in towns near the border, but in the shorthand of U.S. TV news, their suffering and that of Palestinian children in Gaza became indistinguishable.

The contrast between U.S. television and Al Jazeera English (AJE), the Western-managed counterpart to the Arabic channel the Bush administration loved to hate, could not be starker.  After two years of missteps, Al Jazeera English has hit its stride.  And until shortly before the January 19 ceasefire, it was the only channel with international reporters on the ground inside Gaza.  And since late December, it has been all Gaza, all the time.  AJE essentially turned its entire broadcast day over to coverage of the conflict.

In terms of English-language broadcasters, the BBC and CNN International, both of which have a mix of reporters and anchors from around the world, have been doing excellent work from the Israel-Gaza border and beyond.  London-based Tim Whewell’s in-depth and carefully reported five-and-a-half minute piece, “The case for war crimes,” on the BBC’s Newsnight is not something likely to have been aired on U.S. television, while Palestinian producers, such as the BBC’s Rushdie Abualouf, have supplied a steady stream of original footage and reporting from inside Gaza.

But with its mix of Arab and Western correspondents, news executives from Canadian, British and Arab networks, and access to the regional infrastructure and expertise of Al Jazeera Arabic, AJE is a channel born to cover this conflict.

Two correspondents from AJE were in Gaza when Israel sealed the border in mid-December:  Ayman Mohyeldin, an American who started his career as a producer for NBC and CNN, and Sherine Tadros, a British-Egyptian former staffer at Al Arabiya who was sent to Gaza as a producer but moved on camera when the fighting began.  Their reporting has been nothing short of riveting.