Transcript
Captive Audience
November 17, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Paul Watson says you can't cover a war from the tops of buildings. The Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera has decided to focus on the street. Yes, the actual street where protesters burn effigies but also the figurative street which has come to mean the mob. Al-Jazeera has taken the passion and the rhetoric of the street, put it in the studio and beamed it out to 35 million viewers in the Arab world. At least that's the impression of author and scholar Fouad Ajami who wrote an article for the current issue of the New York Times Magazine called What the Muslim World is Watching. Mr. Ajami, welcome to On the Media!
FOUAD AJAMI: Thank you very much for having me!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Before we get to your article, I want to quote from one by Thomas Friedman who said if you polled Arab leaders and asked which would you get rid of first, Israel or Al-Jazeera, Al-Jazeera would win hands down. But just because it infuriates Arab leaders doesn't necessarily mean that Al-Jazeera offers a well-rounded debate does it?
FOUAD AJAMI: Well Al-Jazeera in a way, it's sort of like in a, in an Arab world where there is the officially-guided and, and, and controlled press; where the entire press really actually reports the comings and goings of the head of state, Al-Jazeera came in, in 1996, and challenged all that. And I think that is if you will the, the, the net positive side of Al-Jazeera. On the negative side there's plenty, and there are people who dub Al-Jazeera in the Arab world the Osama bin Laden channel. That's what I call All-Osama, All-the-Time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As a matter of style, you say that Al-Jazeera plays a sly game. Would you elaborate on that?
FOUAD AJAMI:Well I think for example on Israel I felt that this was pretty clever in many ways. What they did is they broke with the silly Arab taboo on interviewing Israelis and having Israelis on Arab airwaves and they would interview Shimon Peres, they would interview Barak, they would give access to their air waves. At the same time there was the steady coverage of the riots in the street and the battles between these young boys with masks and slingshots and the promo - the main tape that Al-Jazeera used over and over again, and there were even Palestinians who complained that this was being opportunistically used was that tragic shooting of that boy, Mohammed Dura [sp?], in his father's arms in Gaza in September 2000 at the end of the month of September.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You also mentioned that it apes the style of Western journalism-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
FOUAD AJAMI: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- while actually stacking the deck in a very different way.
FOUAD AJAMI:You know I'm not a big fan of the McGloughlin Report [sp?]. If you like shouting, Al-Jazeera does it even -- it out-shouts the, the American shouting shows. And I think in many ways it was bound to be like this, I felt. This is a world, the Arab world, where in 1990 it took 3 days for the official Arab media to report that Iraq had conquered Kuwait. So then comes this band of journalists who had been former BBC people -- for the most part Arab nationalists - and Islamists. They are ideological people.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:That's the thing that's rather confusing. It was founded by employees of the BBC who felt that the BBC Arabic services weren't allowing them enough independence. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
FOUAD AJAMI: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It seems to be funded by the government of Qatar.
FOUAD AJAMI: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They don't need to be so inflammatory to survive, so what's their motivation?
FOUAD AJAMI: When the Emir of Qatar gave these people the license, and when he gave them the subsidy, I think he wanted to put Qatar on the map. He wanted to challenge the other rules and he wanted to give Qatar a voice in the affairs of the Arab world. One sly commentator said: In the Arab world you have countries with satellite channels. In the case of Al-Jazeera you have a satellite channel with a country. And it's become this very, very powerful voice!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Since this crisis began, the Bush administration has been contending with the Al-Jazeera factor. Do you think that its role in the current crisis as a molder of public opinion has been over-stated?
FOUAD AJAMI: I think it's been over-stated, but Al-Jazeera succeeded at this. The Bush administration, they wanted to shut down Al-Jazeera. They wanted to shout it down. They wanted to talk to the Emir of Qatar about doing something about Al-Jazeera. Then on the other, you know, face too began the, the charm offensive on Al-Jazeera. So Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld went on the air; Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor went on the air with interviews, Al-Jazeera. And then Secretary of State Colin Powell gave interviews to Al-Jazeera. So we gave Al-Jazeera indiscriminate total access, and we forgot that there were other media in the Arab world, bigger media! Bigger outlets than Al-Jazeera. Why single out Al-Jazeera and why reward its stridency and its radicalism?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But forgetting for a moment that U.S. interests are hurt by Al-Jazeera's slant -what's worse -- having no free media or having free media that would, as you say, make the Fox Newschannel blush?
FOUAD AJAMI: That's the choice. That's the bargain. Either you watch the staid, domesticated press of the Egyptian regime or the Saudi regime or the, you know, Jordanian regime, or you watch Al-Jazeera where there is in effect, forgive me, but it's almost like a journalistic riot.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you very much.
FOUAD AJAMI: Thank you for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Fouad Ajami is author of The Arab Predicament and also of What the Muslim World is Watching which appears in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]