A hazy mirror

The image war between East and West will continue full speed ahead despite this week's high-profile Arab Media Summit in Dubai. Tarek Atia attended
The sad state of the Arab media, and of the image of the Arab world in the Western media, were brought into sharp focus at the highly-charged meeting of over a thousand media professionals from the Arab world and the West in Dubai this week.
The venue was the luxurious Emirates Towers Hotel, new landmark in a city whose enthusiastic drive towards ultra- modernity is considered by some a model of where the Arab world should be heading.
Can the basic picture of Arabs -- backwards, barbaric, oblivious -- that dominates the Western media, more so than ever following the 11 September and the escalating Palestinian-Israeli crisis, be changed?
The forecast did not look good. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, whose speech opened the summit, said Arabs were facing an attack not just on their culture and way of thinking, but on their humanity. In confronting this "campaign of forgery" Arabs had to "be serious, our intentions have to be pure... and we have to stop being suspicious of one other."
Youssef Al-Hassan, an Emirati diplomat and writer, agreed, telling Al- Ahram Weekly that those Arab journalists who take the easy route of blanket criticism of the West reveal one of the fundamental weaknesses in Arab discourse. "Our discourse should first be critical of ourselves. When we speak of others we should do so with an aim to find commonalities not just differences. We have to have the courage to reconsider the stereotypes on both sides."
Al-Hassan emphasised that there was "no guarantee that good media will bring people together in peace. But there is a guarantee that bad media will bring conflict and bloody wars."
Several speakers concentrated on the need to improve Arab society and media before attempting to improve its dialogue with the West. Al-Ahram writer Fahmy Howeidy argued that improving democracy in the Arab world was the doorway to improving the Arab image abroad.
Al-Hayat columnist Jihad Al- Khazen also painted a sad picture of Arab media, partly by saying that the total revenues of all Arab papers hardly equaled that of a single big US paper like The New York Times.
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post received a predictable bashing for their bias. Helena Cobban, a journalist with the Christian Science Monitor, said the Post's opinion pages had become dominated by war mongers. "It's a pity that the US media elite have allowed it to become this way," she said.
Two prominent members of that elite --- longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and New York Times columnist Tomas Friedman -- participated in some of the summit's first sessions, but soon disappeared. Real dialogue with the conference participants over the two days of talks was apparently not on their agenda.
Before his departure Bradlee said he understood that "pictures of American flags burning do not represent the Arab world -- they represent what a few people were doing at a particular time." The fact that Western readers and viewers were seeing little else he blamed not on the Western media, but on the lack of Arab efforts to reach out to the Western media.
And even when they did, Bradlee said, the approach was wrong. Arabs should do more to explain the details of the situation, rather than overtly try to convince the Western reader of the justice of their cause, he argued. "We won't get anywhere if the only goal of any argument is to change the other person's mind. Think like me or leave the room is the wrong approach."
Friedman might have done well to listen to Bradlee's advice. During the summit's stormy first session a comment from the audience about Friedman's coverage of the Saudi peace plan resulted in the columnist leaving the room in a huff. Asked by the Weekly about regular accusations that his writing on the Middle East over-simplifies the situation for an American audience lacking the historical perspective to put it in the proper context, Friedman said, "Simplification is inevitable when you're writing a column of 740 words. I would hope that people judge me by all my columns, not just one. Any individual column may be simplified, but we all do that as journalists, don't we?"
Perhaps not all. Le Monde Diplomatique's Eric Rouleau, a former French ambassador to Tunisia and François Mitterand's Middle East advisor, described his own style of writing as "Cartesian". Journalists, he said, should be critical thinkers who try to be objective.
Al-Hayat's Al-Khazen suggested that people like Friedman were far from the worst, and that Arabs should work with anyone who wasn't flagrantly pro- Israeli in the way that Charles Krauthammer and William Safire are.
Al-Khazen was less enthusiastic, though, about suggestions the Arab world establish a media operation the main goal of which being to present the true picture of the Middle East. That picture was so bad, the popular columnist said, that it would be better to "cover it up than to actually cover it."
In a similar vein, Ali Mohamed Fahkro, who heads a Bahraini think tank, said participants should come out of summits like this not just with an idea of how to improve dialogue with the West, but how to better ourselves, so that we are "dialoguing with the West on equal terms."
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