Watching
al-Jazeera by Marc Lynch
The Arab satellite television station al-Jazeera
is the enemy, or so we are told: “jihad TV,” “killers with
cameras,” “the most powerful ally of terror in the world.”
Shortly after 9/11, Fouad Ajami, distinguished professor of
Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, luridly
described the station in an influential New York Times Magazine essay as a cesspool of anti-American hate that
“deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage.” In June,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told attendees at an
Asian defense conference that if they were to watch al-Jazeera
day after day, “even if you were an American you would begin
to believe that America was bad.” Even Newsweek International’s normally temperate Fareed Zakaria loses his
composure when faced with al-Jazeera, which “fills its
airwaves with crude appeals to Arab nationalism,
anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and religious
fundamentalism.” Denunciation of al-Jazeera is impressively
bipartisan and a starting point for many of the post-9/11
debates over public diplomacy and the war of ideas in the
Middle East.
This consensus is all the
more remarkable given how few of the critics speak Arabic or
have ever actually watched al-Jazeera. If they had, they might
well arrive at a more nuanced judgment. They would certainly
find some support for their disgust. Al-Jazeera may have never
broadcast a beheading video, but it has shown many clips of
terrified hostages begging for their lives. It airs lengthy
statements by Osama bin Laden and invites extremists on its
talk shows. Watching the Egyptian radical Tala’at Ramih
rhapsodize over the beheading of Western hostages on one
popular talk show, or Americans and Iraqi civilians die bloody
deaths, as shown on raw video footage, or ex-Nazi David Duke
discuss American politics at the station’s invitation, it’s
easy to see why al-Jazeera is such a tempting target.
But these incendiary
segments tell only half the story. Al-Jazeera is at the
forefront of a revolution in Arab political culture, one whose
effects have barely begun to be appreciated. Even as the
station complicates the postwar reconstruction of Iraq and
offers a platform for anti-American voices, it is providing an
unprecedented forum for debate in the Arab world that is
eviscerating the legitimacy of the Arab status quo and helping
to build a radically new pluralist political culture.
The neoconservative
Weekly Standard’s call for America to “find a way to overcome
the al-Jazeera effect” gets things exactly wrong. The United
States needs to find ways to work constructively with the
“al-Jazeera effect.” The station is as witheringly critical of
Arab regimes as it is opposed to certain pillars of American
foreign policy. In its urgent desire to promote democracy and
other reforms in the Arab world, al-Jazeera shares important
aspirations with America. Though no friend of U.S. foreign
policy, it is perhaps the single most powerful ally America
can have in pursuit of the broad goal of democratic change in
the Middle East. In the words of Egyptian dissident Saad
al-Din Ibrahim, al-Jazeera has “done probably for the Arab
world more than any organized critical movement could have
done, in opening up the public space, in giving Arab citizens
a newly found opportunity to assert themselves.”
Al-Jazeera was created in Qatar in late 1996 with
financing from the country’s young emir and a staff largely
drawn from a failed Saudi-British joint venture in satellite
television. It was not the first transnational Arab television
station. Within a few years of the 1991 Gulf War, a number of
satellite television stations had gone on the air, filled with
belly dancing, movies, and other forms of entertainment. These
stations reached anybody in the Arab world who had a satellite
dish or access to a café or other public place that showed
satellite programs. Al-Jazeera’s innovation was to make open,
contentious politics central to its transnational mission.
Gone were the belly dancers and the sleepy interviews with
deputy foreign ministers and B-list heads of state that had
dominated Arab airwaves in the past. In their place came
shockingly open and passionate political talk shows and highly
professional, if sensationalist, news coverage focusing on the
problems and issues of the Arab world.
The evolution of al-Jazeera
and the Arab news media reached a turning point in December
1998 with Operation Desert Fox, the Anglo-American bombing
campaign launched against Iraq on the accusation that Saddam
Hussein was restricting access by UN weapons inspectors. It
was the moment when al-Jazeera, the only television channel
with cameras present on the ground at the time of the strikes,
broke through to a mass audience. Al-Jazeera’s graphic footage
riveted Arab viewers and contributed to the massive
anti-American protests that erupted across the region. The
Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada, which broke out in September
2000, was another occasion to broadcast graphic images of
intense combat from the ground level—and talk shows full of
appeals for Arab action against Israel. That coverage
consolidated al-Jazeera’s centrality to Arab political life.
During the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the station’s
exclusive position on the ground once again made its newscasts
essential viewing. In these years, its estimated audience grew
as large as some 50 million viewers, while its Arabic language
website became one of the most popular destinations on the
Internet.
But by early 2003,
al-Jazeera had lost its monopoly on Arab satellite news.
Rivals nipped at its heels: Lebanon’s LBC and Future TV,
Hizbollah’s al-Manar, Abu Dhabi TV, Egypt’s Dream TV.
Al-Arabiya, launched in February 2003 with Saudi financing as
a “moderate” (and pro-American) alternative, quickly emerged
as a powerful competitor. The United States entered the fray a
year later with its own government-run station: the
well-funded but mostly ignored al-Hurra. In market surveys
conducted in late 2004, the Arab Advisors Group found that 72
percent of Jordanians with satellite dishes watched
al-Jazeera, while 54 percent tuned in to al-Arabiya and only
1.5 percent to al-Hurra. Egypt’s market was more skewed, with
88 percent of dish-equipped Cairo residents watching
al-Jazeera, 35 percent watching al-Arabiya, and five percent
watching al-Hurra.
This intense competition has reduced whatever
ability al-Jazeera once had to single-handedly shape opinion
in the Arab world. It is still clearly the dominant satellite
television station, more than first among equals, but it feels
acutely the pressures of competition. The demands of Arab
viewers, who tend to channel-surf and compare content,
increasingly shape the broadcasting strategies of all Arab
television stations. For example, despite his frequent
denunciations of al-Jazeera’s airing of hostage videos,
al-Arabiya’s director, Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed, has admitted
that his station could abstain from airing hostage videos from
Iraq only if al-Jazeera agreed to do likewise. Otherwise, his
station would lose market share.
It is al-Jazeera’s news
broadcasts that have received most of America’s attention.
Critics have lashed out at the station’s coverage of Iraq for
exaggerating violence while ignoring positive developments
there, for fomenting ethnic strife, for allegedly
“collaborating” with insurgents and terrorists. Yet it was
also the station’s news coverage during the heady “Arab
spring” of 2005 that led many to regard al-Jazeera more
favorably. Such longtime critics as interim Iraqi prime
minister Iyad Allawi and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice admitted that the station’s coverage of the Iraqi
elections in January and the Lebanese protests in February
over the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister who
had defied his country’s Syrian occupiers, had aided the cause
of reform.
To focus only on
al-Jazeera’s news programming, however, is to overlook the
station’s most revolutionary aspect: its political talk shows.
Consider al-Jazeera’s response to the fall of Baghdad in April
2003. During the invasion of Iraq, the station went to an
all-news format. When Baghdad fell, it reshaped its prime-time
programming, featuring the bare-bones talk show Minbar al-Jazeera (al-Jazeera’s Platform). In the very first
postwar episode, the beautiful young Lebanese anchor Jumana
al-Nimour faced the camera and asked, “Where is the Iraqi
resistance? Why are the streets of Baghdad empty of Iraqi
dead?” Then she opened the phones, and the voices of the Arab
public poured forth. “Sister Jumana, you grieved over the
fall of Baghdad, but I celebrated the fall of the tyranny. We
hope that this tyrant is slaughtered in the streets of
Baghdad,” said one caller. Another warned, “I have a
message from the Iraqi people. We will not be satisfied with
an American occupation.” A Saudi caller worried that “the
forces came to Iraq to protect the oil, and will abandon Iraq
to civil war.” Another raged that “the issue is not the future
of Iraq. It is the slaughter of Muslims and Arabs at the walls
of Damascus, at the walls of Beirut, at the walls of
Jerusalem, and now the slaughter of Muslims and Arabs at the
walls of Baghdad.”
For weeks thereafter, as an
audience of upward of 30 million looked on, al-Jazeera
opened the phone lines night after night, allowing Arabs from
all over the world to talk about Iraq without scripts or rules
or filters. The anguished, excited, angry, delirious
discussions, in which Arabs struggled to make sense of events,
constituted perhaps the most open and accessible public debate
in Arab history. And they made for great television.
Al-Jazeera is playing a leading role in creating
a new Arab public, and that public is visibly transforming
Arab political culture. For decades, Arab public life was
dominated by the dead hand of the state. The Arab news media
resembled the desert: barren, boring, oppressive,
repetitive, and (if not controlled by a national
government) owned by the Saudis. In the evocative words of
Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, a “politics of silence”
smothered the public life of the Arab world. Arab writers
worked under the constant eye of the intelligence services,
with, as one Jordanian journalist put it, “a policeman on my
chest, a scissors in my brain.” The television programming of
those days offered endless footage of dignitaries sitting on
couches or shaking hands at airports; news broadcasts devoid
of any substance; an incessant hammering on well-worn themes,
such as the Israeli threat; love s current great leader.
Al-Jazeera ushered in a new
kind of open, contentious politics that delighted in
shattering taboos. The names of its most popular talk shows
suggest their distinctive combination of transgression and
pluralism—More Than One
Opinion, No Limits,
The Opposite Direction, Open
Dialogue. Al-Jazeera’s public
defines itself in opposition to the status quo, against the
glorification of kings and presidents and their sycophants. A
program in the summer of 2003 asked viewers whether the
current Arab regimes were worse than the old colonial regimes.
Responding online, 76 percent of the respondents said yes. Nor
does radical Islamism go unchallenged: When the station aired
an exclusive video by al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman
al-Zawahiri in June, it turned his monologue into a dialogue
by inviting one of his leading Islamist critics and several
liberals to respond point by point.
This past March, al-Jazeera
broadcast a discussion with four leading Arab intellectuals on
the results of an online survey about the “priorities of the
Arab street.” While Palestine predictably placed first in the
poll, with 27 percent, “reform” was a very close second with
26 percent, followed by human rights at 11 percent and poverty
at 10 percent. (The U.S. occupation of Iraq, terrorism, and
Islamic extremism all failed to clear the 10 percent
threshold.) Al-Jazeera then assembled panels of ordinary Arab
citizens in Doha, Cairo, Rabat, and Beirut to debate the
implications of the survey. Two months later, al-Arabiya
copied al-Jazeera, airing a very similar program, with very
similar results. Such programs are being noticed by more than
their Arab viewers: Al-Arabiya’s survey ended up being widely
discussed at May’s meeting of the World Economic Forum in
Amman.
The new al-Jazeera-style
openness has proved disconcerting to many. One guest stormed
off the set after being challenged on Quranic interpretation
by a Jordanian feminist. Another demanded that an exchange be
edited out, only to be reminded—on the air—that the program
was being broadcast live. In a June 2000 program, an Iraqi
caller calmly told a guest from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry
that “this unjust blockade imposed on our people has only one
cause and that is Saddam Hussein.” Even the veteran American
diplomat and fluent Arabic speaker Christopher Ross once
admitted that he was “uncomfortable with the panel discussions
and call-in talk shows” on al-Jazeera, preferring situations
in which he could “remain in control.”
Arab regimes have
complained endlessly of the indignities heaped on them by
al-Jazeera’s guests. Jordan closed down al-Jazeera’s offices
after an American academic ridiculed the Hashemite monarchy.
Morocco did the same after its occupation of the Western
Sahara was discussed on a talk show. The Algerian government
allegedly cut power to the entire city of Algiers to prevent
residents from watching a particularly incendiary discussion.
According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “The U.S.
ouster of Saddam Hussein has triggered the first real
‘conversation’ about political reform in the Arab world in a
long, long time. It’s still mostly in private, but more is now
erupting in public.” Any regular viewer of al-Jazeera would
find those remarks laughable. Long before George Bush took up
the mantle of democratizing the Middle East, al-Jazeera
routinely broadcast debates about political reform in the Arab
world. In 1999 alone, the station aired talk show telecasts on
“Arab Democracy between Two Generations,” “Democracy in
the Arab World,” “Arab Participation in Israeli Elections,”
“The Relationship between Rulers and the Ruled in Islam,” “The
Misuse of States of Emergency in the Arab World,” “Human
Rights in the Arab World,” and “Unleashing Freedom of
Thought.” In 2002, only months before the invasion of Iraq,
its programs included “Democracy and the Arab Reality,”
“Reform and Referenda in the Arab World,” and (in a dig at the
democratic trappings of Arab regimes) a mocking look at
“99.99% Electoral Victories.”
Even on Iraq, that most
contentious of topics, the stereotype of al-Jazeera as
relentlessly pro-Saddam or anti-American is misleading. Here
is what was said about Iraq on some of these programs during
the Saddam years:
• December 1998: After
condemning the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq, the popular
Islamist Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi turned his attention
to Saddam Hussein: “We are against Saddam Hussein, but we are
not against the Iraqi people. We consider the Iraqi regime a
criminal and harmful regime for its people. . . . I call on
the Iraqi president to allow freedoms inside of Iraq and to
allow the Iraqi people a voice.”
• January 2000: After Iraqi
foreign minister Mohammed al-Sahhaf claimed that Iraq had
satisfied all the demands of the UN Security Council, he was
visibly brought up short by the curt response of anchor Jumana
al-Nimour: “But this is not what the Security Council says.”
When Sahhaf rejected a new round of weapons inspections,
Nimour coolly responded, “If there are no weapons present, why
are you afraid of an inspections team entering Iraq?” To be
challenged and dismissed, and by a young woman no less, was
not business as usual for a senior Iraqi official.
• August 2003: Faisal
al-Qassem, host of The Opposite
Direction and the most
controversial media figure in the Arab world, faced the
cameras framed by Abd al-Bari Atwan, the radical pan-Arab
nationalist editor of the London-based daily newspaper
al-Quds al-Arabi, and Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman of Ahmed
Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. After posing a withering
series of questions about the American presence in Iraq,
Qassem suddenly reversed direction: “But after seeing the mass
graves, isn’t it time for the Arabs to apologize to the Iraqi
people for their silence over the years?” In the middle of the
show, Qanbar dramatically pulled a pile of documents from his
jacket that proved, he said, that various Arab politicians and
journalists were on Saddam’s payroll.
• May 2004: On the first
talk show after the revelation of sexual torture at the
U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Qassem raised a rather
different issue: torture of Arabs by Arab governments in Arab
prisons. His message could not have been clearer: Not
everything is about America.
Al-Jazeera and its Arab
television competitors are building a pluralist political
culture in which all public issues are up for debate, and
disagreement is not only permissible but expected. Its
importance cannot be overstated, particularly since neither
Islamist movements nor the existing autocratic Arab
regimes—the two most powerful competing forces in the Arab
world—offer a route to liberal reforms. And pro-American
liberals in the region, however brave and eloquent, are, on
their own, weak and marginal. Al-Jazeera offers them what
American guns cannot: credibility, legitimacy, influence. When
Ghassan bin Jadu, al-Jazeera’s Beirut bureau chief and host of
Open Dialogue, sat down on-camera in December 2003 with the
liberal Saad al-Din Ibrahim and the moderate Islamist Fahmy
Huwaydi to discuss Ibrahim’s argument that Arab reformers
should accept American support in their quest for significant
political change, their conversation reached millions of Arab
viewers.
Even as al-Jazeera cultivates a political culture
of fierce public argument, a fundamental question arises: Is
such a culture really a viable foundation for democracy? The
spectacle of Arab politicians screaming at each other is not
always edifying. Nor is the shattering of taboos necessarily
constructive. In the fall of 2000, amid heady Arab
mobilization in support of the Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada,
The Opposite Direction host Qassem claimed that al-Jazeera had
“succeeded in forming an Arab public opinion, probably for the
first time in Arab history.” Less than three years later, he
struck a more despondent note: “Why does nothing remain in the
Arab arena except for some croaking media personalities? Why
does a loud television clamor suffice as an alternative to
effective action?”
Al-Jazeera’s politics of
pluralism are interwoven with an equally potent politics of
Arab identity. Protests in Egypt and Lebanon, elections in
Iraq and Palestine, parliamentary disputes in Jordan or
Kuwait, arrests of journalists in Tunisia and Algeria:
Al-Jazeera covers all of these as part of a single, shared
Arab story. This narrative binds Arabs together in an ongoing
argument about issues on which all Arabs should have an
opinion—though not the same opinion. This politics of identity
is a great source of strength for al-Jazeera. But it also
poses dangers. A frustrated identity politics can easily give
way to demagoguery, to a populism of grievances large and
small, to demands for conformity—to what American legal
scholar Cass Sunstein calls “enclave deliberation,” which
squeezes out the voices in the middle.
Whether populist,
identity-driven but pluralist politics can be the foundation
for liberal reforms is one of the most urgent problems facing
the Arab world today. What one enthusiast called “the
Democratic Republic of al-Jazeera” does not, in fact, exist.
Al-Jazeera cannot create democracy on its own, nor compel Arab
leaders to change their ways. Television talk shows cannot
substitute for the hard work of political organizing and
institution building. Talk can become a mere substitute for
action, and can even serve the interests of regimes intent on
clinging to power.
The Kefaya (“Enough”)
movement in Egypt is the quintessential expression of the new
Arab public. This diverse coalition of oppositional
movements—new Islamists, liberals, Nasserists, and
Arabists—has demanded change from below and an end to the rule
of President Hosni Mubarak. Its name and its narrative
articulate the frustrations of the new Arab public: a
restless, impatient call for an end to the exhausted,
incompetent Arab order, and a fierce resentment of American
foreign policy.
Members of Kefaya have
worked expertly with al-Jazeera (where many of its leading
figures have long been regular guests). The first identifiable
Kefaya protest—in March 2003, against the invasion of
Iraq—turned into an unprecedented anti-Mubarak demonstration.
Kefaya’s television-friendly protests, at first
quite small, soon escalated into larger demonstrations. And
the group’s arguments clearly resonated with the wider Arab
public. Al-Jazeera’s polls show overwhelming rejection of the
Mubarak regime’s self-serving “reforms,” and support for
Kefaya’s impatient demands for change.
Kefaya’s fortunes
demonstrate both the strength and the limitations of the new
Arab public. The combination of a courageous and dedicated
domestic social movement and the magnifying power of the new
Arab media proved capable of transforming the political
environment. But its limits were painfully apparent. The
Egyptian regime soon learned the importance of barring
al-Jazeera cameras from protest sites. Kefaya demonstrators
faced continuing repression and harassment at the hands of
security forces and regime thugs, most notably during the
horrifying attacks on female protestors during the May 25
constitutional referendum. As the Egyptian state retrenched,
the bubble of enthusiasm created by the Arab media’s coverage
of Kefaya threatened to burst, leaving Arabs once again
frustrated and furious.
How has America responded
to this complex, transformative challenge in the Arab world?
Poorly indeed.
After welcoming al-Jazeera in the years before
9/11 as a force challenging the sickly Arab status quo,
American officials became so angry over the station’s coverage
of al-Qaeda and the Afghanistan war that they stopped
appearing on its programs—and thereby lost the opportunity to
reach a vast audience. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and other
prominent members of the Bush administration have frequently
accused al-Jazeera of inciting violence against coalition
forces and airing “atrocious” news coverage. Dorrance Smith, a
former senior media adviser to the Coalition Provisional
Authority, wrote in The Wall Street
Journal earlier this year that
“the collaboration between the terrorists and al-Jazeera is
stronger than ever.”
Criticism is healthy, at
least when it’s not simply an exercise in blaming the
messenger. But Washington has gone beyond criticism. When the
interim Iraqi government shuttered al-Jazeera’s Baghdad
offices, for example, U.S. officials said not a word in
protest. And the Bush administration has allegedly pressured
the government of Qatar to close down, privatize, or censor
al-Jazeera. The new Arab public sees such actions as prime
examples of American hypocrisy. How can America credibly
demand liberalization and democracy in the region when its
first response to political criticism is censorship, pressure,
and abuse?
The other principal U.S.
response to al-Jazeera has been to create the Arabic-language
satellite television station al-Hurra to get America’s message
out in undiluted form. Though al-Hurra has been a dazzling
success in terms of securing large budgets and building
state-of-the-art facilities in northern Virginia, it has sunk
with barely a trace in the intensely competitive Arab media
environment. Few Arabs seem impressed with the quality of its
news programs and talk shows, and the station has struggled to
overcome the inevitable whiff of propaganda surrounding any
government-run station. It has had little impact on either
public opinion or the wider Arab political conversation.
A better American response
would be to actively engage with al-Jazeera. One of the hidden
costs of al-Hurra is that it sucks up the time and energies of
American guests, official or not, who might otherwise be
reaching far wider audiences on al-Jazeera. The United States
should maintain a stable of attractive, fluently
Arabic-speaking representatives, stationed in Doha and other
Arab capitals, whose chief responsibility would be to appear
on any Arab satellite television station that would have them.
Even if they didn’t win every debate, their presence would
force their Arab sparring partners to take American arguments
into account. It would keep Arabs honest, while at the same
time demonstrating to Arab audiences that America took them
seriously and was willing to debate them on an equal footing.
For the new Arab public,
the fundamental challenge today is not to shatter more taboos
or ask more questions but to offer solutions. Al-Jazeera’s
talk shows have given a forum to voices both moderate and
extreme. The shows often err on the side of sensationalism and
false oppositions, inviting conflict rather than reasonable
compromise. In the short term, the station may well have
strengthened anti-American sentiment in the region. But in a
longer view, al-Jazeera is building the foundations of a
pluralist political culture. By replacing stifling consensus
with furious public arguments and secrecy with transparency,
al-Jazeera and its Arab competitors are creating perhaps the
most essential underpinning of liberal democracy: a free and
open critical public space, independent of the state, where
citizens can speak their piece and expect to be heard.
The world will continue to
argue about whether the invasion of Iraq was necessary for the
current democratic ferment in the Middle East. But al-Jazeera
was most assuredly necessary. Shutting it down or muffling its
voice might give Americans some short-term satisfaction, but
to do either would also take away one of the most powerful
weapons in the hands of Arab democratic reformers.

Printer Friendly | Email
to a Friend
Marc Lynch is an associate
professor of political science at Williams College. His new
book, Voices of the New Arab Public, will be published
by Columbia University Press in December.
Reprinted from Summer 2005 Wilson
Quarterly This article may not be
resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any
kind without prior written permission from the author. For
further reprint information, please contact Permissions, The
Wilson Quarterly, One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania
Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. Phone:202/691-4200
E-mail:wq@wilsoncenter.org
|